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This repository gathers COBOL code examples coming from various websites - mostly from the Mainframestechhelp website - or written by ourself. In particular it includes several build scripts (Bash scripts, batch files, Make scripts) for experimenting with the COBOL language on a Windows machine. |
Ada, Akka, C++, Dafny, Dart, Deno, Docker, Erlang, Flix, Golang, GraalVM, Haskell, Kafka, Kotlin, LLVM, Modula-2, Node.js, Rust, Scala 3, Spark, Spring, TruffleSqueak, WiX Toolset and Zig are other topics we are continuously monitoring.
This project depends on the following external software for the Microsoft Windows platform:
Optionally one may also install the following software:
- ConEmu 2023 (release notes)
- opensource COBOL 4J 1.1 (release notes)
- Temurin OpenJDK 17 LTS (release notes)
- Visual COBOL 9.0 (release notes)
- Visual Studio Code 1.95 (release notes)
☛ Installation policy
When possible we install software from a Zip archive rather than via a Windows installer. In our case we definedC:\opt\as the installation directory for optional software tools (in reference to the/opt/directory on Unix).
For instance our development environment looks as follows (November 2024) 2:
C:\opt\cobj\3 ( 10 MB) C:\opt\ConEmu\ ( 26 MB) C:\opt\Git\ ( 392 MB) C:\opt\GnuCOBOL\ ( 548 MB) C:\opt\jdk-temurin-17.0.13_11\ ( 304 MB) C:\opt\msys64\ (2.83 GB) C:\opt\VSCode\ ( 381 MB) C:\Program Files (x86)\Micro Focus\Visual COBOL\ (1.26 GB)
🔎 Git for Windows provides a Bash emulation used to run
git.exefrom the command line (as well as over 250 Unix commands likeawk,diff,file,grep,more,mv,rmdir,sedandwc).
Directory structure ▴
This project has the following directory structure :
bin\
csis-examples\{README.md, MonthTable, etc.}
docs\
dovey-examples\{README.md, Colors, etc.}
examples\{README.md, helloworld, etc.}
harris-examples\{README.md, 100Doors, FizzBuzz, etc.}
moseley-examples\{README.md, Elapsed, etc.}
COBOL_4J.md
GNUCOBOL.md
VISUAL_COBOL.md
README.md
RESOURCES.md
setenv.bat
where
- directory
bin\provides several utility batch files - directory
csis-examplescontains several COBOL examples from the University of Limerick. - directory
docs\contains several COBOL related papers/articles (docs\README.md). - directory
examples\contains COBOL examples grabbed from various websites (examples\README.md). - directory
harris-examplescontains COBOL examples from Mike Harris GitHub repository. - file
COBOL_4J.mdgathers usage information about COBOL 4J. - file
GNUCOBOL.mdgathers usage information about GnuCOBOL. - file
VISUAL_COBOL.mdgathers usage information about Visual COBOL. - file
README.mdis the Markdown document for this page. - file
RESOURCES.mdis the Markdown document presenting external resources. - file
setenv.batis the batch command for setting up our environment.
We also define a virtual drive – e.g. drive J: – in our working environment in order to reduce/hide the real path of our project directory (see article "Windows command prompt limitation" from Microsoft Support).
🔎 We use the Windows external command
substto create virtual drives; for instance:> subst J: %USERPROFILE%\workspace\cobol-examples
In the next section we give a brief description of the batch files present in this project.
setenv.bat 4
We execute command setenv.bat once to setup our development environment; it makes external tools such as git.exe, make.exe and sh.exe directly available from the command prompt.
> setenv Tool versions: cobc 3.3.0, ccbl 9.0.0.49, cobj 1.1.3, java 17.0.12, make 4.4.1, git 2.47.0, diff 3.10, bash 5.2.37(1) > where git make sh C:\opt\Git\bin\git.exe C:\opt\Git\mingw64\bin\git.exe C:\opt\msys64\usr\bin\make.exe C:\opt\Git\bin\sh.exe C:\opt\Git\usr\bin\sh.exe
🔎 Command
setenv helpdisplays the help messsage :
Footnotes ▴
[1] MSYS2 libraries ↩
- Some COBOL examples depend on the gmp library – A free library for arbitrary precision arithmetic – which is part of our local MSYS2 installation.
[2] Downloads ↩
-
In our case we downloaded the following installation files (see section 1):
ConEmuPack.230724.7z ( 5 MB) gnucobol-3.2-aio-20240306-user.msi ( 92 MB) msys2-x86_64-20240727.exe ( 83 MB) OpenJDK17U-jdk_x64_windows_hotspot_17.0.13_11.zip (188 MB) opensourcecobol4j-1.1.3.zip ( 8 MB) PortableGit-2.47.0-64-bit.7z.exe ( 41 MB) VSCode-win32-x64-1.95.0.zip (131 MB) vcvs2022_90.exe (for Visual Studio 2022) (820 MB)
☛ GnuCOBOL distribution
We prefer the All-in-One distribution from SuperBOL over the GnuCOBOL distribution from Arnold Trembley because it works out of the box (i.e. with no extra configuration settings).
[3] COBOL 4J ↩
-
We built the COBOL 4J distribution from the source archive
opensourcecobol4j-1.1.3.zipand installed it into directoryC:\opt\cobj\. The 3 build steps are described in the COBOL 4J online documentation:> set PATH=%MSYS_HOME%\usr\bin;%PATH% > sh ./configure --prefix=/c/opt/cobj [...] OpenCOBOL Configuration: CC gcc COB_CC gcc CFLAGS -O2 -finline-functions -fsigned-char -Wall -Wwrite-strings -Wmissing-prototypes -Wno-format-security COB_CFLAGS -I/c/opt/cobj/include COB_EXTRA_FLAGS LDFLAGS COB_LDFLAGS COB_LIBS -L${exec_prefix}/lib -lcob -lm COB_CONFIG_DIR ${datarootdir}/opensource-cobol-4j-1.1.3/config COB_COPY_DIR ${datarootdir}/opensource-cobol-4j-1.1.3/copy COB_LIBRARY_PATH ${exec_prefix}/lib/opensource-cobol-4j-1.1.3 COB_MODULE_EXT COB_SHARED_OPT -shared COB_PIC_FLAGS -fPIC -DPIC COB_EXPORT_DYN -Wl,--export-dynamic COB_STRIP_CMD strip --strip-unneeded Use gettext for international messages: no Use fcntl for file locking: yes > make [...] Making all in libcobj make[2]: Entering directory '/j/opensourcecobol4j-1.1.3/libcobj' ./gradlew shadowJar Starting a Gradle Daemon (subsequent builds will be faster) BUILD SUCCESSFUL in 50s 2 actionable tasks: 2 executed make[2]: Leaving directory '/j/opensourcecobol4j-1.1.3/libcobj' make[2]: Entering directory '/j/opensourcecobol4j-1.1.3' make[2]: Leaving directory '/j/opensourcecobol4j-1.1.3' make[1]: Leaving directory '/j/opensourcecobol4j-1.1.3' > make install
Note: The
make installcommand requires that the following development tools are available through thePATHenvironment variable :> where autoconf bison flex c:\opt\msys64\usr\bin\autoconf c:\opt\msys64\usr\bin\bison.exe c:\opt\msys64\usr\bin\flex.exe
If that is yet not the case we execute the following command :
> c:\opt\msys64\usr\bin\pacman.exe -Suy flex
In our case the installation directory
C:\opt\cobj\looks as follows :> tree /a /f c:\opt\cobj | findstr /v /b [A-Z] +---bin | cob-config | cobj-api | cobj-idx | cobj.exe | cobjrun.exe +---include | libcobj.h +---lib | \---opensourcecobol4j | libcobj.jar \---share \---opensource-cobol-4j-1.1.3 +---config | bs2000.conf | cobol2002.conf | cobol85.conf | default.conf | ibm.conf | mf.conf | mvs.conf \---copy screenio.cpy
[4] setenv.bat usage ↩
-
Batch file
setenv.bathas specific environment variables set that enable us to use command-line developer tools more easily. - It is similar to the setup scripts described on the page "Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt and Developer PowerShell" of the Visual Studio online documentation.
-
For instance we can quickly check that the two scripts
Launch-VsDevShell.ps1andVsDevCmd.batare indeed available in our Visual Studio 2019 installation :> where /r "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio" *vsdev* C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\Tools\Launch-VsDevShell.ps1 C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\Tools\VsDevCmd.bat C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\Tools\vsdevcmd\core\vsdevcmd_end.bat C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\Tools\vsdevcmd\core\vsdevcmd_start.bat
-
Concretely, in our GitHub projects which depend on Visual Studio (e.g.
michelou/cpp-examples),setenv.batdoes invokeVsDevCmd.bat(resp.vcvarall.batfor older Visual Studio versions) to setup the Visual Studio tools on the command prompt.