I have not done any COBOL programming for more than 15 years. The last time was in 1995, during my studies.
We used Microfocus Visual COBOL back then, I believe.
So anyways, the other day I heard about Cobol-IT Developer Studio, a free COBOL development workshop based on Eclipse !
I gave it a try and i think it’s a pretty cool development environment for anyone willing to learn COBOL.
It requires Java SE 1.5 or higher, Microsoft Visual C++ Express (freely available at http://www.microsoft.com/express/vc) and of course COBOL-IT Compiler Suite.
Here is what it looks like :
It comes with autocompletion and a debugger which seems not to be working well :
If you run this simple program (addition/multiplication) :
*-----------------------------------------------------------------
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. 'operation'.
AUTHOR. Celinio Fernandes
*
DATA DIVISION.
WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
*
01 Num1 PIC 9 VALUE ZEROS.
01 Num2 PIC 9 VALUE ZEROS.
01 Result PIC 99 VALUE ZEROS.
01 Operator PIC X VALUE SPACE.
*-----------------------------------------------------------------
LINKAGE SECTION.
*-----------------------------------------------------------------
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
*-----------------------------------------------------------------
Calculator
PERFORM 10 TIMES
DISPLAY "Enter the first number : " WITH NO ADVANCING
ACCEPT Num1
DISPLAY "Enter the second number : " WITH NO ADVANCING
ACCEPT Num2
DISPLAY "Choose the operator (+ or *) : " WITH NO ADVANCING
ACCEPT Operator
IF Operator = "+" THEN
ADD Num1, Num2 GIVING Result
END-IF
IF Operator = "*" THEN
MULTIPLY Num1 BY Num2 GIVING Result
END-IF
DISPLAY "The result is = ", Result
END-PERFORM.
STOP RUN.
*-----------------------------------------------------------------
*--- End of program --------------------------------------
it will produce this output, in a DOS console :
