[open-cobol-list] open cobol in the professional environment

[Hans-Martin Rasch]

Hi, 

during the last year we migrated our application from a BS2000 mainframe to 
FreeBSD/i386 machines. The application contains online transaction processing 
and batch jobs as well, a large part (about 2 million lines of code) is 
written in COBOL 85. We don't access the data with the COBOL runtime, but 
with C modules called from the COBOL pograms.

On the new system we have chosen OpenCobol as COBOL compiler, which since 
turned out to be stable and reliable. So I would like to thank all people who 
contributed to OC, especially Keisuke Nishida and Roger While!

Of course we had some problems with non standard constructions in our sources 
and with programs relying on the runtime behaviour where the standard says 
"behaviour undefined". We decided that it would be better to fix our sources 
than to change (or let change) OC, and there remained only few cases where we 
modified OC (I will report about these in subsequent mails).
And of course we are missing something too, and that is debugging on COBOL 
level. Has anybody started to work at the debugging support mentioned in the 
TODO?

Hans-Martin Rasch