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Yeah, but the language is largely irrelevant here right (assuming the intent in posting this was "look a free open source cobol"). The difficulty in cobol syste

Yeah, but the language is largely irrelevant here right (assuming the intent in posting this was "look a free open source cobol"). The difficulty in cobol systems is that IBM Mainframes are really cool, but insanely expensive and locked down. I can put GNUCobol on my laptop and learn hello world, but I won't have access to the mainframe transactions, which is probably 99% of the problem in learning a Cobol system.

wsh 6y ago
Indeed: mainframe COBOL programs often invoke transaction processing and data management facilities (using “EXEC CICS,” “EXEC DLI,” or “EXEC SQL” statements, for example) that aren’t part of the standardized COBOL language. There are commercial software packages for re-hosting mainframe applications to other platforms. These typically provide not only COBOL and PL/I compilers but also functional equivalents of CICS, VSAM, JCL (JES2), and other mainframe system software.
- 7thaccount 6y ago
  Thanks for the confirmation and the additional background information. So an open-source/free version of one of those "re-hosting" packages sounds like it would be useful for someone wanting to learn about cobol + mainframe development, but I can't imagine that ever happening (demand can't be too high) lol.
maxharris 6y ago
Yup! It gets even worse: I got stuck for a year once working on COBOL software that only ran on Solaris, depended on Micro Focus's buggy and slow $3000 compiler, did binary searches across flat files and depended on Unix calls like mmap(). I got it up and running long enough to see how the code worked so that it could be rewritten in Pascal (this was chosen because that's what the guy I was working with preferred). COBOL is a terrible, verbose language that doesn't even have local variables. It belongs on the ash-heap of computing history, not in any project that should be maintained today.
- 7thaccount 6y ago
  How long ago was that?
  - maxharris 6y ago
    This was 16 years ago; wow I feel old.

wsh 6y ago

Indeed: mainframe COBOL programs often invoke transaction processing and data management facilities (using “EXEC CICS,” “EXEC DLI,” or “EXEC SQL” statements, for example) that aren’t part of the standardized COBOL language. There are commercial software packages for re-hosting mainframe applications to other platforms. These typically provide not only COBOL and PL/I compilers but also functional equivalents of CICS, VSAM, JCL (JES2), and other mainframe system software.

7thaccount 6y ago
Thanks for the confirmation and the additional background information. So an open-source/free version of one of those "re-hosting" packages sounds like it would be useful for someone wanting to learn about cobol + mainframe development, but I can't imagine that ever happening (demand can't be too high) lol.

maxharris 6y ago

Yup! It gets even worse: I got stuck for a year once working on COBOL software that only ran on Solaris, depended on Micro Focus's buggy and slow $3000 compiler, did binary searches across flat files and depended on Unix calls like mmap(). I got it up and running long enough to see how the code worked so that it could be rewritten in Pascal (this was chosen because that's what the guy I was working with preferred). COBOL is a terrible, verbose language that doesn't even have local variables. It belongs on the ash-heap of computing history, not in any project that should be maintained today.

7thaccount 6y ago
How long ago was that?
- maxharris 6y ago
  This was 16 years ago; wow I feel old.