[Info-vax] VMS Cobol - GnuCOBOL

[Paul Gavin]

On Tuesday, February 21, 2023 at 2:02:18 AM UTC-7, Single Stage to Orbit wrote:
> On Mon, 2023-02-20 at 14:56 -0800, Denys Beauchemin wrote: 
> > 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.
> Perhaps it should also migrate back onto VMS (x86_64). Who knows, that 
> might be a shot in the arm for OpenVMS. :-D 
> -- 
> Tactical Nuclear Kittens

Having attempted to move sample code from two flavors of COBOL code (OpenVMS terminal and HP-UX ANSI format) to GnuCOBOL, I had to modify every comment and most continuation lines to get them to compile. Shell script was fairly simple to write to fix these issues, but still changed the code. None of the VMS code used by descriptor calls in the main code, but calls to system services on both side were a pain. Both had database precompiler needs (CODASYL and Informix) and those certainly would not work at all. 

Chocked up the two weeks spent to playing with a toy that was not ready for prime time.