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 :
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