[Info-vax] VMS Cobol - GnuCOBOL

[Denys Beauchemin]

On Tuesday, February 21, 2023 at 3:12:04 PM UTC-6, Paul Gavin wrote:
> 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.

In a current project, the Sector7 COBOL remediation tool does over 400,000 remediations to about 2 million LOC of COBOL.  Case changes, dashes to underscores, descriptors, and various other fixes are applied.  It takes about 10 minutes to process all the OpenVMS COBOL code.  It takes about 6 minutes to compile all the remedied COBOL code on Linux and another 4 minutes to link and create the 1000 executables.  On Itanium, the OpenVMS code base takes about 8-10 hours to compile and link.