See this short discussion on a Stingray Reader feature:

https://sourceforge.net/p/stingrayreader/discussion/COBOL/thread/d2132851/?limit=25#2a3a

This turned into an exercise in pure TDD.

<rant>

I'm not a fan of applying TDD in a strict, death-march fashion.

I see the comments on Stack Overflow that …

Here's an interesting problem. Implement the split command for mainframe COBOL EBCDIC files with their BDW and RDW headers.

The conventional split can't handle COBOL EBCDIC files because they don't have sensible \n line breaks. Translating an EBCDIC file to ASCII is high-risk because COMP and COMP-3 fields will be …

We'll be digging into Mastering Object-Oriented Python. Chapter 17, specifically.

We'll also be looking at a big refactoring of the Stingray Schema-Based File Reader.

We can identify three species of packages.

One common design is a Simple Package. A directory with an empty __init__.py file. This package name becomes …

• Some small improvements to the COBOL DDE parsing.
• A sensible demo program that shows how to read COBOL files.
• A complete rewrite to Python3.3.
• Support for more COBOL syntax.
• Support for Occurs Depending On
• Support for RECFM=F, RECFM=V and RECFM=VB …

Just updated the Stingray Reader. There was an egregious error (and a missing test case). I fixed the error, but didn't add a test case to cover the problem. It's simple laziness. TDD is quite clear on how to tackle this kind of thing. Write the missing test case (which …

In Command-Line Applications, we looked at a Python main-import switch which boiled down to this.

for file in args.file:
    with open( file, "r" ) as source:
        process_file( source, args )

The point was that each distinct file on the command-line was processed in a more-or-less uniform way by a single function …