In message <[log in to unmask]>, Ron Seybold 
<[log in to unmask]> writing at 17:57:37 in his/her local time opines:-
>Hi Friends,
>
>> do my mis-firing neurons recall that gnucobol was formerly open
>> cobol...which was actually very close to mpe cobol?
>
>At sourceforge.net, the headline is GnuCOBOL, formerly OpenCOBOL.
>
><http://sourceforge.net/projects/open-cobol/>
>
>What what it about OpenCOBOL that made it so much like COBOL II?
>
>Ron Seybold
>3000 Newswire

I used OpenCOBOL to port two HP3000 COBOL programs - only two, but one 
of them was the big and critical engine at the heart of a system 
otherwise written completely in PowerHouse.

I first used the portability checker on COBOL II to make a few 
amendments to bring the program in line with the standards - and was 
able to roll that version back into the production HP3000 code at the 
time.

The thing that remained non-standard, but which OpenCOBOL supported, 
IIRC, was entry points. I could have got round the limitation of not 
having them, but I was pleased not to have to.

The one remaining issue after that was not having Image on the new 
platform, but having to use Oracle. So I rewrote the Image calls as 
Oracle PRO*COBOL calls. And I was quite surprised that this made the 
program shorter, or would have if I hadn't left the Image calls in, but 
commented out, so I could refer back to them if there were issues.

So, armed with a readable program, I slotted it through the PRO*COBOL 
precompiler, which spits out unreadable COBOL, put that through the 
OpenCOBOL compiler, which spits out C (or did then, at any rate - does 
it still?) and then compiled that with the GNU C compiler.

All accomplished in a single makefile, so not hard to do :-)

The prospect of debugging any intermediate stage of this tottering house 
of cards was not inviting, but fortunately I didn't need to - all my 
mistakes were clearly visible in the PRO*COBOL source.

Once I got it working, which was a surprisingly smooth process, I handed 
it over, and left for my next assignment.

Checking back a year later, I was pleased to learn it had all just gone 
live, and the attentions of the finest Oracle optimisers known to man 
meant that the system was now up to 'only' twice as slow as the HP3000 
original. Despite running on unimaginably more powerful Intel hardware 
running RHEL 5.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to get back over the event horizon 
of a black hole that to get off an HP3000, even 'lift and shift' which 
this was.

No wonder so many are still running, including the four I help look 
after that should have been pensioned off, as indeed I should have been, 
years ago :-)


-- 
Roy Brown        'Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be
Kelmscott Ltd     useful, or believe to be beautiful'  William Morris

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