It's been 3 and a half months since the last release. During that time I've moved to a new flat, and been pretty busy with work, so haven't had a lot of time to work on the COBOL compiler.

This release introduces support for writing sequential data files. My target for this release was to have it compile the example "students.cbl" from the University of Limerick's Intorduction to Sequential Files correctly. I came across one issue in doing this: The tutorial has a PERFORM loop specified as:

PERFORM UNTIL StudentRec = SPACES

I've been following IBM's VS COBOL II grammar which doesn't cover non-arithmetical relational conditions in PERFORM loops. My code which makes this work is not the most elegant solution, but it does get the job done.

Version 0.1.14 of the Wildcat COBOL Compiler is available in both source and binary form here.

The other thing that's been taking up my time recently is the experimentation I've been doing with version control software (aka source code management software). Over the past 4 weeks, I've been using Bazaar a lot. It's the version control software used by Canonical's Launchpad. I have created a project on Launchpad for the Wildcat COBOL compiler.