Is this Forum Moderated?

Is this Forum Moderated?

[patrick]

As is plain to see, the quality of the posting in this forum are at an all time low.

Is this forum even moderated?

I spend a lot of my time with the GnuCOBOL project and I love it. It's well moderated and very friendly. The language is also super easy to interface with Ada, much more so than C.

There are some super awesome people on this list but it's quickly becoming close to unuseable.

I don't think I can manage this right now but has anyone else thought of setting up a sourceforge project and using the mailing list features?

With GnuCOBNOL we were going to move at one point. sourceforge was doing weird things with peoples projects like bundling in junk. There seems to be new ownership and everything has been smooth for sometime.

I am sure there are many other options too like github etc.

Would it also make sense to copy over the FSF version and start some community development of it? There seems to be a fair amount of grumbling about Adacore these days.

Just a thought... I can't actually help out, I am spread way too thin right now.

Best of luck and special thanks to Dmitry, Ludovic, Jacob, Luke, Simon, Randy, J-P, Bjorn, Brian, Shark8, Mike, Tero and a dozen others for all the support over the years

Re: Is this Forum Moderated?

[Jere]

On Sunday, May 20, 2018 at 7:46:05 AM UTC-4, pat...@spellingbeewinnars.org wrote:
> As is plain to see, the quality of the posting in this forum are at an all time low.
> 
> Is this forum even moderated?
> 
> I spend a lot of my time with the GnuCOBOL project and I love it. It's well moderated and very friendly. The language is also super easy to interface with Ada, much more so than C.
> 
> There are some super awesome people on this list but it's quickly becoming close to unuseable.
> 
> I don't think I can manage this right now but has anyone else thought of setting up a sourceforge project and using the mailing list features?
> 
> With GnuCOBNOL we were going to move at one point. sourceforge was doing weird things with peoples projects like bundling in junk. There seems to be new ownership and everything has been smooth for sometime.
> 
> I am sure there are many other options too like github etc.
> 
> Would it also make sense to copy over the FSF version and start some community development of it? There seems to be a fair amount of grumbling about Adacore these days.
> 
> Just a thought... I can't actually help out, I am spread way too thin right now.
> 
> Best of luck and special thanks to Dmitry, Ludovic, Jacob, Luke, Simon, Randy, J-P, Bjorn, Brian, Shark8, Mike, Tero and a dozen others for all the support over the years

Keep in mind that this isn't a forum.  This is an email newsgroup.  A lot of
the users are using a mail client to read these.  Google Groups archives
the emails so it looks like a forum if you use that interface.  If you
are using the mail client method, you can actually add people to your
killfile and they no longer show up in your output unless someone else
responds to them.

Re: Is this Forum Moderated?

[Dan'l Miller]

On Sunday, May 20, 2018 at 6:46:05 AM UTC-5, pat...@spellingbeewinnars.org wrote:
> As is plain to see, the quality of the posting in this forum are at an all time low.
> 
> Is this forum even moderated?

referring to:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.c++/OGoy0g1IdmQ

Is any Google Group (formerly Usenet newsgroup) moderated anymore?  Were the moderation servers that some university ceased sponsoring utilized by only comp.lang.c++.moderated or by all .moderated newsgroups/Google-groups?  What was the scope of the elimination of .moderated newsgroups?

I am not sure what caused the cobbled-together replacement to the former university-based moderation servers to fail.  (That cobbled-together replacement might have only served comp.lang.c++.moderated anyway.)

Re: Is this Forum Moderated?

[Shark8]

On Sunday, May 20, 2018 at 5:46:05 AM UTC-6, pat...@spellingbeewinnars.org wrote:
> As is plain to see, the quality of the posting in this forum are at an all time low.
> 
> Is this forum even moderated?

I don't think it is... at all.

> 
> I spend a lot of my time with the GnuCOBOL project and I love it. It's well moderated and very friendly. The language is also super easy to interface with Ada, much more so than C.

I have had the idea, for a while, that banks & insurance companies & other financial institutions could see a lot of improvement WRT modernization with mixed Ada/COBOL programs; in particular doing the report-generation in COBOL and the main "business logic" in Ada (with heavy usage of types to ensure correctness) instead of the [seemingly] more popular "PORT IT TO JAVA" that I've seen some people advocate.

What are your thoughts?

> 
> There are some super awesome people on this list but it's quickly becoming close to unuseable.

You know, I think there's only two posters [at least that spring to mind] which vastly detract: the "I do Delphi and post random shit"-guy and the "Can Ada/GNOGA/whatever make me money without me having to learn or do anything"-guy.

> Would it also make sense to copy over the FSF version and start some community development of it? There seems to be a fair amount of grumbling about Adacore these days.

Honestly, I'd rather do a fresh project rather than deal with having to fix up someone else's mess (esp WRT licensing) -- that's why I started Byron.

> Just a thought... I can't actually help out, I am spread way too thin right now.

Not a problem.
But if you know anybody who would be interested, don't hesitate to send them my way... it would probably be a lot easier if there were other people involved in Byron.

> 
> Best of luck and special thanks to Dmitry, Ludovic, Jacob, Luke, Simon, Randy, J-P, Bjorn, Brian, Shark8, Mike, Tero and a dozen others for all the support over the years

You're quite welcome.

Re: Is this Forum Moderated?

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

On Sun, 20 May 2018 04:46:04 -0700 (PDT), patrick@spellingbeewinnars.org
declaimed the following:

>As is plain to see, the quality of the posting in this forum are at an all time low.
>
>Is this forum even moderated?
>
	This is a Usenet newsgroup -- conventionally, moderated newsgroups had
a .moderated in the name.

>I don't think I can manage this right now but has anyone else thought of setting up a sourceforge project and using the mailing list features?
>

	Which would just split the community -- I, for one, prefer Usenet/NNTP
for forums and would not bother with looking for something I need to
individually subscribe to and then create filters to manage. Using a
news-server lets me fetch messages on my schedule from multiple groups,
automatically handles the separation by groups, etc.


-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
	wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/ 

Re: Is this Forum Moderated?

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

On Sun, 20 May 2018 06:24:03 -0700 (PDT), "Dan'l Miller"
<optikos@verizon.net> declaimed the following:

>On Sunday, May 20, 2018 at 6:46:05 AM UTC-5, pat...@spellingbeewinnars.org wrote:
>> As is plain to see, the quality of the posting in this forum are at an all time low.
>> 
>> Is this forum even moderated?
>
>referring to:
>https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.c++/OGoy0g1IdmQ
>
>Is any Google Group (formerly Usenet newsgroup) moderated anymore?  Were the moderation servers that some university ceased sponsoring utilized by only comp.lang.c++.moderated or by all .moderated newsgroups/Google-groups?  What was the scope of the elimination of .moderated newsgroups?

	As I recall, when a moderated newsgroup was approved, there had to be a
number of defined moderators... Messages would be automatically be
forwarded to them (as email) for approval, and they would release them to
the NNTP news system. There was no "one moderation server"; each moderated
newsgroup had its list of moderators to which posts would be routed.

	There are 251 news groups with .moderated in my client's newsgroup
listing (I'm not subscribed to any of them -- especially not something like
free.clinton.scandal.moderated or things similar to that ilk).

	Anything one finds on Google Groups is outside the realms of proper
NNTP -- in effect, GG will accept any post with retention to eternity, and
only gateways to Usenet... Posts could be moderated out in Usenet, but
still appear on GG.


-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
	wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/ 

Re: Is this Forum Moderated?

[Simon Wright]

patrick@spellingbeewinnars.org writes:

> Would it also make sense to copy over the FSF version and start some
> community development of it? There seems to be a fair amount of
> grumbling about Adacore these days.

One could just fork https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/ (usually only a
few minutes behind the main SVN repo).

Best of luck with that.

Re: Is this Forum Moderated?

[patrick]

Hi Shark8 !

"I have had the idea, for a while, that banks & insurance companies & other financial institutions could see a lot of improvement WRT modernization with mixed Ada/COBOL programs; in particular doing the report-generation in COBOL and the main "business logic" in Ada (with heavy usage of types to ensure correctness) instead of the [seemingly] more popular "PORT IT TO JAVA" that I've seen some people advocate.

What are your thoughts? "

I think whenever we bring up another language besides Ada we are going to get negative posts but I am putting on my helmet and body armor now.....

It took me many years to build up the confidence to look at languages with my own eyes and to ignore the hype. It brought me to Ada and to COBOL as well.

There is actually a great deal of overlap between two in terms of functionality.

IMHO Ada is best suited as the "main" with COBOL as library code. GnuCOBOL is not thread safe and should be in it's own task. If you can manage with an ncurses interface, the screen section in COBOL is great.

I would recommend to leave whatever business logic you can in COBOL and to use Ada's strengths of programming in the large, exceptions and tasking.

GnuCOBOL has a small runtime that is much easier to alter than GNAT's. I have made modifications to the screen section to allow for idle calls backs, 256 colour support and mouse support.

The GnuCOBOL list is very approachable and tightly moderated. You won't get any RTFM like posts. It's a second home to me now.

I have test code to interface the two and I would love to help you. I don't use interfaces.cobol. COBOL already has lots of types ready for use with C and they are compatible with Ada too. strings.fixed and the built-in strings work great. GnuCOBOL just added report writer support this January and I am pretty familiar with it too.

COBOL is haunted with criticism from the past. I have seen COBOL 1968 and 1974 vintage code and it sucks large. The COBOL 85 revision made it an awesome language. I am not crazy about the 2002 revisions but just so you know, you don't have to obey a rigid layout with the 2002 revision. You can pass the -free flag to the compiler and whitespace becomes insensitive, you can use uppercase or lowercase and identifers can be 30 characters long or even longer if you wish.

GnuCOBOL compiles to intermediate C and the generated code is easy to read once you get the hang of it. The project uses pretty standard libraries like GMP, libtool and ncurses. The compiler is Bison/Flex.The licensing arrangement is also a bit complicated like the GNAT situation but basically you can use the default settings which will link in libdb and force AGPL code or you can use an older libdb version for GPL code or you can use an external library called libvbism and you can have a LGPL runtime suitable for linking to you preferred license.

Where is Byron? I would like to check it out.

Thanks-Pat

Re: Is this Forum Moderated?

[patrick]

I think I found it, here is the link for everyone:
https://github.com/onewingedshark/byron

Re: Is this Forum Moderated?

[Dan'l Miller]

On Sunday, May 20, 2018 at 9:42:59 AM UTC-5, Simon Wright wrote:
> patrick writes:
> 
> > Would it also make sense to copy over the FSF version and start some
> > community development of it? There seems to be a fair amount of
> > grumbling about Adacore these days.
> 
> One could just fork https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/ (usually only a
> few minutes behind the main SVN repo).
> 
> Best of luck with that.

It could be accomplished quite easily quite mechanically with low drama:

If the fork were done with a single laser-precise reason (e.g., to write an LLVM alternative to GIGI), then a very clean interface could be the very precise dotted line to cut along for a Leskov-Substitution-Principle drop-in of something new into GNAT (e.g., an LLVM alternative to GIGI).  Over along the threads of “disruptors of & inventory of Ada compilers and latest their era of ISO8652 compliance”, I proposed the name GigiEmittingLLVM as the name of the project.  (Because GigiEmittingLLVM has so many syllables, I squinted at it and said it 10 times fast to come up with a clipped-form nickname:  GiggleVM.  For people who don't enjoy injecting a little humor into their lives, I suppose it could be an initialism for GIGI Emits LLVM IR [GELI], pronounced jelly.)

If the fork of GCC GitHub were utilized for an LLVM alternative to GIGI (and thus to the entire backend of GNAT), this technique would not need to be terribly messy (as long as DragonEgg's metastasizing-design mistakes were all avoided).  All of GCC (and thus GNAT) could be merged in en masse.  All of LLVM could be merged in en masse.  If this fork didn't even fix GCC bugs and didn't even fix LLVM bugs, then the merge conflicts could be near zero for both GCC rebasing and LLVM rebasing.  If the LSP interface were the iterator/cursor that walks the fully-semantically-adorned GNAT IR tree (leaving all of GIGI itself untouched), then the only churn that would cause battle-royale merge conflicts would be changes to this iterator/cursor interface itself.  (New semantic adornments to the GNAT IR tree do not fall into this category; they are just more new-development new-feature-set new-bug-fix work on the GNAT-IR-to-LLVM-IR-GiggleVM/GELI's to-do list.)

There is a fair chance that LLVM already has all the primitives needed to express every conceivable Ada construct and semantics.   (GNAT didn't have to extend GCC's C IR very much over all these years; there have been 10 tree types added to GCC's C IR for Ada topics, and even 6 of those have varying degrees of ‘it never actually shows up in the tree downstream from GIGI’.)

The modus operandi for DragonEgg was apparently ‘metastasize like cancer’.  The modus operandi for GELI (or GiggleVM or whatever it would be called) would be precision laser-cut at the iterator/cursor that walks GNAT's fully-semantically-adorned Ada IR tree.  That way, GELI wouldn't need much “good luck with that”.

Re: Is this Forum Moderated?

[Lucretia]

On Sunday, 20 May 2018 14:51:56 UTC+1, Sky89  wrote:

> Don't bother, i have posted just a few posts, i will not continu to post 
> off-topic.

What you call "just a few posts," I've just counted 31 top level posts within last few days. Seriously, what is your problem? Are you employed to be a dick in one of the Chinese spam factory's?

Re: Is this Forum Moderated?

[Shark8]

On Sunday, May 20, 2018 at 9:53:48 AM UTC-6, pat...@spellingbeewinnars.org wrote:
> I think I found it, here is the link for everyone:
> https://github.com/onewingedshark/byron

That's exactly it.
I've isolated the parsing here: https://github.com/OneWingedShark/Pratt_Parse -- mostly because there's an irritating bug regarding precedence that I couldn't figure out. My plan was, once that was fixed, to roll it back into Byron and work on the semantics portion [and IR] of the compiler, then code-generation.

Re: Is this Forum Moderated?

[Brian Drummond]

On Sun, 20 May 2018 09:18:15 -0700, Dan'l Miller wrote:


> 
> There is a fair chance that LLVM already has all the primitives needed
> to express every conceivable Ada construct and semantics.   (GNAT didn't
> have to extend GCC's C IR very much over all these years; there have
> been 10 tree types added to GCC's C IR for Ada topics, and even 6 of
> those have varying degrees of ‘it never actually shows up in the tree
> downstream from GIGI’.)

One it doesn't have : support for nested subprograms. It's too heavily 
modelled on C.

I believe  this was one of the problems Dragonegg was facing.

The GHDL project already faced this, when translating its own IR 
("ortho") to the LLVM backend, and overcame it successfully, so it's not 
a total showstopper

I haven't dived into src/ortho/llvm in the ghdl source tree to find out 
how Tristan did it.

-- Brias

Re: Is this Forum Moderated?

[Dan'l Miller]

On Monday, May 21, 2018 at 6:40:14 AM UTC-5, Brian Drummond wrote:
> On Sun, 20 May 2018 09:18:15 -0700, Dan'l Miller wrote:
> 
> 
> > 
> > There is a fair chance that LLVM already has all the primitives needed
> > to express every conceivable Ada construct and semantics.   (GNAT didn't
> > have to extend GCC's C IR very much over all these years; there have
> > been 10 tree types added to GCC's C IR for Ada topics, and even 6 of
> > those have varying degrees of ‘it never actually shows up in the tree
> > downstream from GIGI’.)
> 
> One it doesn't have : support for nested subprograms. It's too heavily 
> modelled on C.

  Well, Clang supports C++11, C++14, C++17.  C++11 has lambdas that can be assigned to a named local variable, which is substantially the same feature, not in the language per se, but as an idiom nowadays.

http://clang-developers.42468.n3.nabble.com/Nested-functions-in-Clang-tp4047603p4047605.html

auto const local_function = [&](int parameter) {
  // Do something
};
...
local_function(1);

so GELI (GIGI-alternative Emits LLVM IR, the LLVM-based alternative to GIGI in GNAT) would emit the LLVM bitcode IR that Clang today already emits there.

Steps on the road to GNAT's GELI as an alternative to GIGI:
0) To design and author GELI, the LLVM-facing rear of the Clang front-end would be borrowed in general.
1) On a per tree-node type in GNAT's Ada-IR tree (i.e., whatever snippet of work that the iterator/cursor traversing GNAT's fully-semantically-adorned Ada-IR tree bites off for GIGI to chew on), GELI would first borrow the corresponding C++ language feature's LLVM-bitcode-IR generation code…
2) … then compare that starting point to what GIGI transduces into the C-IR tree for GNAT to find semantic adornments in the Ada-IR tree that were not covered …
3) … then ponder whether C++ or any non-C language has any additional delta of semantics not already covered by GELI's LLVM-bitcode-IR generation for that snippet …
3.1) if yes,
3.1.1) then borrow from that language's corresponding LLVM-bitcode-IR generation code;
3.1.2) then compare GELI's evermore-evolved LLVM-bitcode-IR generation for that snippet with what GIGI transduces into the C-IR tree for GNAT; go to step 3.
3.2) if no, then author fresh LLVM-bitcode-IR generation code from scratch; go to step 3.
4) If more snippets of GNAT's fully-semantically-adorned Ada-IR tree remain without LLVM-bitcode-IR generation in GELI, go to step 1.
5) Release GELI-based/LLVM-backended GNAT corresponding to a major.minor FSF GCC release.
6) If new language features or bug-fixes were released into FSF GNAT for the next GCC release, go to step 1.
7) Maintain this GELI fork of GNAT indefinitely until accepted* into GCC or until something like GELI is released into FSF GNAT by AdaCore**.

* which could conceivably be never, given that GELI requires the entirety of LLVM to be wholesale imported into GCC to comply with the Target Code clauses of GPLv3 and the Eligible Compilation Process of its Runtime Exception

** which, post-Dewar, might or might not have enough sway with RMS himself to pull off the idea of importing*** the entirety of LLVM into GCC merely for GNAT's needs.

*** or AdaCore could conceivably opt (in the publicly-released-to-FSF GNAT source code) to emit IR from GCC for downstream processing by a separate nonGPL-licensed LLVM executable, thus triggering the ••••LLVM-produced machine code downstream to strictly be full-fledged GPLv3-licensed•••• due to not satisfying GPLv3's Target Code clause and likely not satisfying Runtime Exception's Eligible Compilation Process clause either.  And then customers who pay for GNAT Pro would not rely on that every-LLVM-target-must-be-GPLv3ed version; they could conceivably get & rely on something more resembling GELI('s satisfaction of the Target Code and Eligible Compilation Process clauses), so that AdaCore's customers would not need GPLv3-license all their LLVM-target executables and libraries.  If past track record predicts future regarding post-3.15p GNAT, then this third *** variant might be the most likely, unless RMS himself is displeased with even emitting LLVM IR at all from GCC.

(If RMS would be displeased by even the slightest whiff of LLVM & LLVM's bitcode IR anywhere near GCC [which •seems• to be the read-the-tea-leaves current vibe], then the current status quo is the most likely:  no LLVM machine-code generation from FSF GNAT whatsoever, other than the one-off DragonEgg experiment.)

> I believe  this was one of the problems Dragonegg was facing.

Looking through DragonEgg's source code reveals that borrowing the LLVM bitcode IR for C++11's assigning a lambda to a named local variable is the least of the problems that DragonEgg's stick-fingers-into-far-too-many-pies design was facing.

> The GHDL project already faced this, when translating its own IR 
> ("ortho") to the LLVM backend, and overcame it successfully, so it's not 
> a total showstopper

Clang also already faced this for C++11, as shown above.

> I haven't dived into src/ortho/llvm in the ghdl source tree to find out 
> how Tristan did it.

The authoring of GELI will require looking at the LLVM-backended open-source compilers for Clang, Flang, Haskell's GHC, Rust, GHDL, and so forth to harvest GPLv3-compatible-licensed source code inspiration from which to borrow, wherever analogous language features or analogous higher-order-usage idioms of lower-language features can be found in other languages.