In addition to those suggestions already made, I will suggest that you make
your target implementation ANSI 85 COBOL, with the 1989 intrinsics, but with
no platform-specific extensions. The greatest obstacle to overcome is that
this is nearly impossible. At the very least, you are probably going to read
and write files and DBMS. And file systems tend toward the
platform-specific, and DBMSs tend toward the DBMS specific. That said, these
can be isolated into libraries of copybooks. So can other platform specific
artifacts, such as reading and setting environment variables, or reading in
command line parms.

This approach limits your challenge to cross-referencing HP COBOL to those
things which should work on any target platform for which there is an ANSI
85 COBOL compiler. So, always compile with whatever directive flags these,
so someone can audit the code for compliance to your standards.

Now, should you already know your target platform, and have a vendor in mind
for the compiler & IDE, that vendor may have a source code tool which will
help find and change all occurrences of a given (presumably platform
specific) extension or intrinsic.

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David T Darnell [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Thursday, May 30, 2002 1:20 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: COBOL MPE to ??? language syntax and feature comparison.
>
>
> Where can I find a cross-reference between HP's COBOL
> languages and COBOL
> compilers available on Unixen, to determine which HP COBOL features,
> keywords, etc. must be changed?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Dave

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