[Info-vax] VMS Cobol - GnuCOBOL

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 2/25/2023 7:00 AM, Neil Rieck wrote:
> Anyway, until Arne published this article, I did not know about
> GnuCOBOL so I used the yum/dnf tool on one of my Rocky Linux systems
> to install a copy. It worked like a charm -AND- appears to contain a
> number gnu-specific extensions which can be enabled-disabled by
> command line switches (same as what you might see with gcc). Since
> I've been out of the COBOL game for a long while, I grabbed some old
> example programs which demo ISAM file creation. They worked like a
> charm as well (not sure if the ISAM support is built into GnuCOBOL or
> is dependent upon some already-installed system library). But this
> has been a very pleasurable nerdish adventure for me which cost
> several hours and zero dollars.

GnuCOBOL comes in 3 flavors:
* indexed files support via BDB
* indexed files support via VBISAM
* no support for indexed files

You should check what flavor you got.

BDB may be sligtly better than VBISAM, but there are
different license situations:

BDB - AGPL or commercial license from Oracle (!)
VBISAM - LGPL

Many will not like a library under AGPL.

Arne