[Info-vax] GnuCOBOL - Was: Re: Oracle on VMS

[Paul Sture]

On 2016-11-19, Bill Gunshannon <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  Just so people understand where I am coming from, I am not really
>  interested in either of the databases but I am interested in how
>  embedded SQL is implemented on the commercial DBs because I am trying
>  to look into implementing it for open source DBs and GnuCOBOL.

Ah, I looked at what was known as openCOBOL just a year ago. At that
time it was in the process of transitioning to GnuCOBOL and I wondered
if it had kind of gone there to die.

It seems it's very much alive and work is being done on new features,
and V2.n now supports the Report Writer.

For others who may be interested, see the "GnuCOBOL Guides" page:

<http://open-cobol.sourceforge.net/>

Although V2.1 is the latest, the V2.0 Programmer's Guide contains
a useful "Summary of changes" section.

For those coming from DEC/Compaq/HP COBOL, the Digital Terminal
Format[1] for source code isn't recognised as such, but you can either
use '-free' on the command line or embed the following at the
beginning of the source:

       >> source format is free

comments are also a bit different in that they start with '*>'
instead of just '*'

DB4 aka 'Berkeley DB version 4 from Oracle' is supplied with the
version(s) I have and this is used for indexed files.

And a bit of icing on the cake, despite all the examples shown being in
uppercase, the cobc compiler is perfectly happy with lowercase
statements and variable names :-)

[1] You probably won't find it documented anywhere, but gfortran seems
quite happy with Digital-style Terminal Format Fortran 77 source. The
same comments as for Cobol apply for lowercase statements and variable
names :-)

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