Learning COBOL: A Journey for the Modern Programmer

Re:Learning COBOL: A Journey for the Modern Programmer by AceStrider1 on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @12:27PM (#26727195)

But which COBOL? Microfocus now own RM/COBOL and AccuCOBOl, as well as their own MicrFocus Cobol. These are for the IBM PC and run on Windows, Unix, and Linux. Old code usually uses compiler dependent extensions, and without a good amount of work, I can not just recompile using a diffrent vendor's cobol. And if it does happrn to compile it may not work because the expected behaviour of implrmented language key words might be slightly diffrent. I ran inro this trying to port code to GNUCobol

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Re:Learning COBOL: A Journey for the Modern Programmer by Diederich on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @01:30PM (#26728034)

> AccuCOBOl

That's a name I haven't read in a long time.

I wrote a bunch of this when I was in the USAF, 81st Medical Group, back in the early/mid 1990s.

It had some neat features, including a robust, platform independent GUI, and platform independent bytecode.

Specifically, you could write a GUI program in AcuCOBOL and compile it, which resulted in a compact file that could then be put on any other kind of computer that had the AcuCOBOL runtime installed and then executed.

The GUI your program produced depended on the platform it was running on. If, like us, running on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviion UNIX with nice big x-terms, you'd get an X11 GUI, unless you set a specific environment variable, in which case you'd get a nice curses-like GUI. The DOS runtime produced...if memory serves...a kind of curses-like, somewhat text based GUI.

Pretty neat stuff for the time.

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Re:Learning COBOL: A Journey for the Modern Programmer by marktangotango on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @05:11PM (#26731363)

> key words might be slightly diffrent. I ran inro this trying to port code to GNUCobol

Do you recall what those were specifically?

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