OpenCOBOL

OpenCOBOL

Original author(s)	Keisuke Nishida
Developer(s)	Roger While
Initial release	25, 2002 (2002-01-25)
Stable release	OpenCOBOL 1.0 / December 27, 2007
Preview release	OpenCOBOL 1.1 / February 24, 2009
Written in	C
Operating system	POSIX
Platform	Cross-platform
Size	1Mb
Available in	English
Development status	Stable
Type	Programming Language
License	GPL with runtime libraries under LGPL.
Website	http://opencobol.org

OpenCOBOL, is a freely available open source implementation of the COBOL programming language. Originally designed by Keisuke Nishida, the lead developer is now Roger While.

History

While working with Rildo Pragana on TinyCOBOL, Keisuke decided to attempt a COBOL compiler suitable for integration with gcc. This soon became the OpenCOBOL project. Keisuke worked as the lead developer up till 2005 and version 0.31. Roger then took over as lead and released OpenCOBOL 1.0 on December 27, 2007. Work on the OpenCOBOL 1.1 pre-release has been in active development ever since.

Philosophy

While striving to keep inline with COBOL Standards up to the 20xx Draft, and to include features common in existent compilers, (the 1.1 pre-release passes over 9,000 of the tests included in the NIST COBOL 85 test suite), there is no claim to any level of standards conformance.

OpenCOBOL translates COBOL source code to intermediate C, which is then compiled to native binary for execution, or as object code or into a dynamic library for linkage.

Hello OpenCOBOL

Historical

000100* HELLO.COB OpenCOBOL FAQ example
000200 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
000300 PROGRAM-ID. hello.
000400 PROCEDURE DIVISION.
000500     DISPLAY "Hello World!".
000600     STOP RUN.

Modern

*> OpenCOBOL Hello World example
identification division.
program-id. hello.
procedure division.
display "Hello World!" end-display
goback.

Shortest

program-id.hello.procedure division.display "Hello World!".

Compile and execute

For the Historical example

$ cobc -x HELLO.COB
$ ./HELLO
Hello World!

cobc defaults to FIXED FORMAT translation. The FREE FORMAT (either the Modern or Shortest) can be compiled with

$ cobc -x -free hello.cob
$ ./hello
Hello World!

Implementation

The parser and lexical scanner use Bison and Flex. The GPL licensed compiler and LGPL licensed run-time libraries are written in C and use the C ABI for external program linkage.

Build packaging uses the GNU build system. Compiler tests for make check use Perl scripts.

The configure script that sets up the OpenCOBOL compile has options that include:

• choice of C compiler for post translation compilation
• database management system for ISAM support
• inclusion of iconv.

Availability

1.0 release from SourceForge.

1.1 pre-release tarball from sim-basis.de.

open-cobol Debian package.

External links

• OpenCOBOL website
• OpenCOBOL FAQ
• Add1ToCOBOL Open Source Cobol and OpenCobol advocacy site
• TinyCOBOL website