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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, Go, GraalVM, Haskell, Kafka, Kotlin, LLVM, Modula-2, Node.js, Rust, Scala 3, Spark, Spring, Standard ML, 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 1.97 (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 (February 2025) 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-17.0.14_7\ ( 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 1.1.6, java 17.0.14, make 4.4.1, git 2.48.1, 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 message :
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_17.0.14_7.zip (188 MB) opensourcecobol4j-1.1.6.zip ( 8 MB) PortableGit-2.48.1-64-bit.7z.exe ( 41 MB) VSCode-win32-x64-1.97.2.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-1.1.6.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-1.1.6/config COB_COPY_DIR ${datarootdir}/opensource-cobol-4j-1.1.6/copy COB_LIBRARY_PATH ${exec_prefix}/lib/opensource-cobol-4j-1.1.6 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-1.1.6/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-1.1.6/libcobj' make[2]: Entering directory '/j/opensourcecobol4j-1.1.6' make[2]: Leaving directory '/j/opensourcecobol4j-1.1.6' make[1]: Leaving directory '/j/opensourcecobol4j-1.1.6' > 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-1.1.6 +---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.