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COBOL TEST SUITE: source robots can show what they can with this!

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Crox

Crox

Programmer
Apr 3, 2000
892
0
16
NL
Hi,

Ever heard of the NIST COBOL test suite?

You can find it here:


You can download a file with (when expanded) 29Mb of sources. It is a zipped tar file. With something like winzip you can get it. It is one long file containing several programs. You can split the sources, using the GETNIST program I have for you (see my e-mail at my profile). Because it is a compiler test, all COBOL statements are used. So it is filled with examples.

It is interesting for people whom want to have a look at many COBOL 85 examples.

It is very interesting for vendors because with this set of sources, they can publish their results with ( business- )logic-mining, auto documentation, etc.

You Vendors, will you please put your links here with the results of your analysis of this software? It would be great to compare the results! ( if you dare! )

If you are doing something with this, please leave a message here and tell us what you are going to do with it.

Vendors, please give us your links with the results of your processing.

With Friendly Regards and hoping for much response,

Crox
 
The NIST test suite, formerly known as the CCVS (COBOL Compiler Validation Suite), was produced in the era when the US Federal Government (and I guess the British government) cared about a level of conformance of a vendor's offering. In the US this used to be known as FIPS COBOL (FIPS = Federal Information Processing Standard), or more officially FIPS 21. FIPS COBOL called out specific levels of compliance, and you will find a "FIPS flagging" feature dormant in implementations of COBOL that were validated by NIST. NIST terminated COBOL validation services (along with a lot of other validation services) in 1997 (I think).

While the NIST test suite is useful for driving a compiler and runtime support library through a lot of paths, it is not particularly useful for anything else. There are no performance based results, for instance. We use it in our QA test suite, but we have many other tests to provide coverage where the NIST suite never goes.
Tom Morrison
 
The NIST sources are very useful because they are there and anybody can do something with it. I am not talking about performance. The COBVSC sources from CA-REALIA are nice to use for that, but that is only one source and not the volume and variation we need.

Getting information out of 29Mb of sources, understanding te structure of the sources and/or the system, that is of interest for everybody digging in legacy environments. I am mostly interested in software that helps a programmer to do his/her work, taking the feeling away that 'NOTHING IS MORE KILLING THAT DOING THE WRONG THINGS MORE EFFICIENT' which is especially true when trying to interpret old sources where many people worked on, all with their own 'brilliance', never taking care of if anybody after them would understand their so called 'contributions'.

If you have better sources for these cases, publish your link. Let it be a good volume of sources, let it be representative so that it is a good test.

For now I did not see any good alternative. Just saying no is also no alternative. Providing links to general test sources, that is an alternative.

Regards,

Crox
 
Very silent here...
 
Not exactly sure what should break the silence.

The NIST tests are readily available from NIST, as one can see from the link given. I am not sure what benefit Crox expects from vendors. The only valid result from using the NIST tests was the ability to claim a certain level of FIPS compliance. Virtually every vendor 'passed' these tests and was FIPS compliant; certainly our product did because we have had the US government as a customer. I note from a web search that EDS now offers the service of testing various language compilers for compliance using the NIST tests.

Our coverage tests (as well as other performance oriented regression tests) usually are derived rather directly from actual customer programs, so we will not publish those. A very small minority of our tests are quite contrived in order to drive our compiler through bizarre error paths -- that is, we really have coverage tests.

Awaiting clarification..... [bigears]

Tom Morrison
 
I haven't seen any source-robot output yet or any link to it. Benefits from vendors: show the automated documentation that your tools make out of these sources; impress me please! I am not expecting compiler output.
 
It seems difficult..... :)
 
What does it take exactly to open that file? I opened the zip part of the NIST file, but my program won't recognize the file I got from that as a TAR file.
 
My program" was WinRAR.

Tried WinZIP and even TAR out of the copy of Linux I'm running. Still no dice. RAR and ZIP say it's a corrupted file, and the TAR program says it finds nothing.
 
I spoke too soon based on comments that mentioned "tar format".

It is not, it is a specific format, with several programs within, identified with a "*HEADER..." string.
It requires a specific program to do, but for the looks of it the very first program within the file may well be able to do that on it's own.



Regards

Frederico Fonseca
SysSoft Integrated Ltd
 
Yep, I loaded the file and saw the sources. It looks like it just needs chopped up based on the headers and things to the right side of the source. Just was going off of what Crox said in the first post of this thread.
 
and Crox even has a mention to this .
You can split the sources, using the GETNIST program I have for you (see my e-mail at my profile)
Click to expand...


Argh.
Crox if you prefer send me the program and I will place it on my webpage available for the others.



Regards

Frederico Fonseca
SysSoft Integrated Ltd
 
Dear Frederico,

GETNIST is send to you as is with source and executable. The Realia run-time system tries to do something with the floppy disk when it runs in NT-environments so also with XP. It does not care and the program will divide all the sources. You should read the readme file. The email address in the readme does not exist anymore.

Regards,

Crox
 
Crox,


That's fine.

My email in case you haven't found it already is
frederico_fonseca
domaim syssoft-int.com




Regards

Frederico Fonseca
SysSoft Integrated Ltd
 
It was send to info, but you get it also directly now!
 
Nice, Thanks Frederico! It was downloadable here in Holland with 40Kb/sec.
 
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