[Info-vax] VMS Cobol - GnuCOBOL

[Denys Beauchemin]

Yeah, Gnucobol, in my opinion; is more like something to play around as a concept; it’s not a serious mission-critical answer for OpenVMS COBOL migration.  The C code it generates is nightmarish.

About 10 years ago, we at Sector7 created a tool that migrates OpenVMS COBOL to an ANSI COBOL compatible format.  It does this by removing the various VMS extensions that have been built into the OpenVMS COBOL over the decades and let me tell you, there are a lot of them.  One of the more complex ones is the concept of a DESCRIPTOR in arguments to a procedure. 

We can transform millions of LOC of OpenVMS COBOL code in a few minutes and the generated sources are ANSI COBOL.  We have been using NETCOBOL as one of the compilers on Linux because it only requires an inexpensive development license to compile the code.  The executables do not require a license to run on the production servers.  Of course, if you have another ANSI COBOL compiler that you want to use, there may be some adjustment needed to the transformation tool, but the code should compile with you preferred COBOL compiler.

We also bundle in a set of extensions for gdb so you can debug and easily view/modify the data contained in the COBOL structures using gdb.

The migration code runs on Linux and the code it generates is pure COBOL, easily maintainable on Linux.  The tool knows all about the Sector7 library of system services on Linux so the compiled code can be linked with the library and will run on Linux just like on OpenVMS.