Building essentials

Of course there are tons of compiler and linker directives for covering a myriad of scenarios. Using a rather old 16-bits compiler makes it somewhat difficult to get the corresponding documentation. But it's not yet impossible to find out at least some fragments of information in order to get started with this legacy software. A web search pattern that may work, even after browsing several result pages for a while, is: "COBOL Book Shelf". Even if not a perfect match, backwards compatibility can work in favor to getting something useful after all.

Source-code editor

The source-code text editor is also very important to the programmer's productivity. I'm not personally fond of any IDE. I prefer to have full control of what's going on under the hood. Furthermore, I'm not inclined to learning or maintaining complex IDE settings or features.

Lab - Windows NT

At first, on a Windows NT lab environment one doesn't seem to need an initial VDM (virtual DOS machine) as carefully configured as in DOS. But in pure DOS I was able to get even more free conventional memory, about 615 KB. And by using XCOBOL under DOS one doesn't really need Windows NT at all, as long as the required 512 KB of EMS and presumably some XMS as well could be set aside as shown on a previous post. Hence, so far, I don't see any advantage on using Windows NT for conducting builds, since using a DOS with RAM drives are blindly fast for the whole workflow and you can have many of them side by side and better isolated than in Windows NT.

Lab - DOS 6.22

For a DOS 6.22 lab environment one could have a system configuration allowing for maximum 32 MB XMS and no EMS memory in order to compensate for the inherent limited conventional memory. Nevertheless, this strategy seems useless for Microsoft ® COBOL 4.5 since it lacks the ability to take of XMS as XCOBOL in Microsoft ® COBOL 5.0.

Lab environment

For this blog laboratory I'll struggle for using bare minimum resources. As such I'll use legacy 32-bits PC hardware & software which for COBOL-85 can be enough to get cool things carried out.

Welcome

Hi, this blog is dedicated to COBOL and my main interest is sharing some personal notes and opinions about what I particularly consider as best coding style and features of the COBOL language. I also try to approach ways of mitigating some of the language shortcomings.