Re: [open-cobol-list] Hi all

[Brian Tiffin]

Martin Lindkvist wrote:
> Hi there,
> My name is martin Lindkvist from sweden and i have newly graduated 
> from a cobol course in sweden. I have during this year under my 
> studies used GnuCobol 1.1 and realy like it.
> I am realy glad to se the new 2.0 comming together. The latest 
> GnuCobol i have found now is GnuCobol-c++  and i dont know if this 
> will mean that we can start to make qt-grafical iterfaces now with 
> Gnucobol... This will be great for me as i'm using kdevelop as my ide.
I'm guessing yes.  I was going to sit down and try out C++ linkage, and 
the name mangling issues that will likely arise.  The C++ branch is by 
Sergey, and he's a (thee?) world master at cross platform GnuCOBOL.  He 
has builds on kiska.net for AS/400, z/Os, and on and on.

I've been working up a GTK+ layer, but back in the day, Qt was on top of 
the pile.  Turns out that the C++ linkage issues became a show stopper, 
as there is no direct route from C based GnuCOBOL to Qt link names.  
Wrappers would have been required for each and every piece.  GnuCOBOL 
C++ may not suffer from that problem, in which case Qt would be a boon.
> Right now i use kdevelop with just normal makefile and 
> kate-highlighting and that works good. for debugging i have this 
> terminal app from an italian dude . I asked in the kdevelop forum if 
> they knew if someone was working on support for GNUcobol language 
> (because i hade seen in an relay old mailinglist that some company was 
> making that) but got the answer that they knew noting about anyone 
> doing that. I have aswell seen some where on the gnucobol forum a 
> question abot just that and by that time the answer was no. So i was 
> thinking to ask the question one more time here and aswell inform that 
> i could se that next verion ov kdevelop will run on this crasy 
> non-free system called windblows.
>
> And another question is about jcl... i have found many companys that 
> sells jcl interpreters an so on but do we have one FREEsource for nix 
> like systems?

It's not JCL for GNU/Linux, but we've been discussing the benefits of 
running miniframes with Hercules and the TK4-  (MVS circa 1981, 
predecessor to z/OS).  I'll be looking into running a miniframe along 
side the GnuCOBOL project, perhaps give someone a leg up on a career in 
an actual mainframe environment.  Will know more over the next few 
weeks.  JCL is one of the skill sets that is rarely discussed openly on 
the internet, as most mainframe operations are not open operations, they 
are the operations that run the world as we know it, and not generally 
for public knowledge or discussion, at least not in the common 
channels.  Chatter is there, but you rarely bump into it by accident.

I've got on old tar ball for actual jcl on GNU/Linux, but it'll need 
work to build with current systems, perhaps someday.

But, JCL is really for mainframe environments.  Knowing a little bit 
about it can't hurt, but it won't likely ever come into play in a POSIX 
or Windows environment.
> And a last question...
> Is there a mail-list for jobs with GNUcobol?

gnucobol.newcobug.com might house such an animal.  We've never been 
overly commercial, but there are likely avenues somewhere.
> ohhh i missed one realy last question... right now i'm using a 
> precompiler for mysql but when i compiled the GNUcobol 2.0 and started 
> to look around in the folder i saw a sqlca in the copybook catalog... 
> why is that ?
Those few copybooks that ship with GnuCOBOL have a history.  sqlca and 
sqlda are for some of the existent EXEC SQL pre-processors. Used 
currently by ocESQL, and code generated by some existent compilers that 
GnuCOBOL wanted to be compatible with.  I'm pretty sure Oracle procobol 
and others assume they are available, a defacto standard.
> Regards
> Martin Lindkvist

Cheers,
Brian