I know a lot of people would take this as a farcical question, but I really am this crazy. :-P

I'm looking for a good place to start learning COBOL. I have experience with a variety of older languages, but there isn't anything in particular that I have true fluency with other than BASIC. I've never been fond of OOP, but that could just be the autism prefering Structured and Procedural paradigms. I've tried to learn COBOL from the language spec, which worked OK for getting me to a point that I can read and understand programs, but I really would like to find a resource for learning to write them, even if it's for an older version of the language.

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smartyhall wrote to All <=-

I'm looking for a good place to start learning COBOL. I have experience with a variety of older languages, but there isn't anything in
particular that I have true fluency with other than BASIC.

I studied CS in the late '80s, and there was a plethora of free languages
for DOS. I remember starting in Pascal and FORTRAN, then finding a LISP interpreter and Modula-2 compilers available. And, of course, tons of ANSI C compilers.

I never saw a COBOL compiler, don't know if it was because of demand or hardware requirements - trying to think about the amount of work to get from COBOL to X86 assembly boggles the mind.


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Re: Re: COBOL for Beginners
By: poindexter FORTRAN to smartyhall on Thu Dec 05 2019 07:10 am

I studied CS in the late '80s, and there was a plethora of free languages for DOS. I remember starting in Pascal and FORTRAN, then finding a LISP interpreter and Modula-2 compilers available. And, of course, tons of ANSI C compilers.

We did FORTRAN and COBOL in high school. Back in '80. We used this big epsidic (sp) machine to type out our punch cards. Then we would put them in theis huge collator and run them through and then we would print out if what we did was successful.
It never failed when you had about 100 cards for a major project and the machine sucks it up. Or you mistype that one letter.
Grease
darmatt.synchro.net

...I stayed in a really old hotel last night. They sent me a wake-up letter.

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I'm looking for a good place to start learning COBOL. I have experience with a >ariety of older languages, but there isn't anything in particular that I have t
ue fluency with other than BASIC. I've never been fond of OOP, but that could j
st be the autism prefering Structured and Procedural paradigms. I've tried to l
arn COBOL from the language spec, which worked OK for getting me to a point tha
I can read and understand programs, but I really would like to find a resource
for learning to write them, even if it's for an older version of the language.

COBOL is actually the one language I am somewhat fluent in. Unfortunately,
I am not sure where you find a place to learn it these days. I guess you
can do what you might do for anything else like that -- buy a book, find
some old class materials (like books), or maybe find a learning resource on
the internet.

A quick google search just pulled up a tutorial at tutorialspoint.com and a somewhat expensive book on murach.com. A search for "COBOL programming" on amazon.com turns up several books (some expensive some not so much) on the topic of learning the language.

I use it mostly at my job, but have also used to to write a few utilities
for my DOS BBS, mostly for processing log files (plain text) and a few
other things.


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smartyhall wrote to All <=-

I know a lot of people would take this as a farcical question, but I really am this crazy. :-P

I'm looking for a good place to start learning COBOL.

Ya, you're crazy. 8)

COBOL is on the out and pretty much only on Mainframes (even then, there's not much active development - primarily maintenance).

But if you really want to spend some time with it, there's GnuCOBOL, NetCOBOL for .Net, and probably more.

I built an RC2014 (a Z80 based retrocomputer running CP/M 2.2) and I was able to locate a COBOL compiler on one of the software archives.

So a quick Google search should let you find what you need.


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I never saw a COBOL compiler, don't know if it was because of demand or hardware requirements - trying to think about the amount of work to get from COBOL to X86 assembly boggles the mind.

There was not a free one I know of, but IBM/MicroFocus had one. I bought a copy several years ago. IIRC, it would run on a 386. Not sure if it would
run on less of a machine than that.

There are free ones now, for linux at least. I believe what they actually
do is convert the COBOL source to another language and then compile it from there.


* SLMR 2.1a * SHOCKING TRUTH: 50% of all people are below average....

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Re: Re: COBOL for Beginners
By: Grease to poindexter FORTRAN on Thu Dec 05 2019 04:25 pm

We did FORTRAN and COBOL in high school. Back in '80. We used this big epsidic (sp) machine to type out our punch cards. Then we would put them in theis huge collator and run them through and then we would print out if what we did was successful.
It never failed when you had about 100 cards for a major project and the machine sucks it up. Or you mistype that one letter.
Grease

EBCDIC - Extended Binary Coded Decimal

a.k.a. Yet another bad idea in service of "customer retention." lol

I really should give FORTRAN another go. In any case, I long to one day have enough room for a card punch of my verry own. I've just about given up on my childhood dream of owning a fully-functional UNIVAC with drum storage though.
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Re: COBOL for Beginners
By: Dumas Walker to SMARTYHALL on Thu Dec 05 2019 04:51 pm

COBOL is actually the one language I am somewhat fluent in. Unfortunately, I am not sure where you find a place to learn it these days. I guess you can do what you might do for anything else like that -- buy a book, find some old class materials (like books), or maybe find a learning resource on the internet.

A quick google search just pulled up a tutorial at tutorialspoint.com and a somewhat expensive book on murach.com. A search for "COBOL programming" on amazon.com turns up several books (some expensive some not so much) on the topic of learning the language.

I use it mostly at my job, but have also used to to write a few utilities for my DOS BBS, mostly for processing log files (plain text) and a few
other things.

I believe I've actually tried that tutorial before. Self-directed learning resources are always so hit and miss for me. Over the years, I've taught myself some crazy things just from reeding manuals, but for some subjects, I just end up needing some extra hand-holding.
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Re: Re: COBOL for Beginners
By: Dr. What to smartyhall on Fri Dec 06 2019 06:14 pm

smartyhall wrote to All <=-

I know a lot of people would take this as a farcical question, but I really am this crazy. :-P

I'm looking for a good place to start learning COBOL.

Ya, you're crazy. 8)

COBOL is on the out and pretty much only on Mainframes (even then, there's not much active development - primarily maintenance).

But if you really want to spend some time with it, there's GnuCOBOL, NetCOBOL for .Net, and probably more.

I built an RC2014 (a Z80 based retrocomputer running CP/M 2.2) and I was able to locate a COBOL compiler on one of the software archives.

So a quick Google search should let you find what you need.

I actually have a fondness for maintaining arcane and forgotten infrastructure, especially when the threat of imminent doom looms behind every mistake. I think that comes from all the time I've spent working in live video production in studios that had gone through one too many engineers that didn't ever take the time to clean up the spaghetti of cables and converters that tends to accrete in such environments.

CP/M is an OS I haven't thought of in ages! Maybe I should just dust off a vintage computer from my collection and try retro COBOL. I never have spent that much time with CP/M, and I could do with learning more about pip. :-P
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Re: Re: COBOL for Beginners
By: Dumas Walker to POINDEXTER FORTRAN on Fri Dec 06 2019 06:17 pm

I never saw a COBOL compiler, don't know if it was because of demand or hardware requirements - trying to think about the amount of work to get from COBOL to X86 assembly boggles the mind.

There was not a free one I know of, but IBM/MicroFocus had one. I bought a copy several years ago. IIRC, it would run on a 386. Not sure if it would run on less of a machine than that.

There are free ones now, for linux at least. I believe what they actually do is convert the COBOL source to another language and then compile it from there.

Transpilers often seem like the Great White Whale of computer science. It's so tempting to go down the path of...

If I just write a transpiler that turns this into an intermediate language that is more simple and elegant, I can easily write a compiler that handles that efficiently. Then, I can just advance that compiler and apply it to anything else I encounter in the future, just by writing a simple transpiler. I mean, what's so hard about BNF grammars and trans-language transformations?

:-D
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Re: Re: COBOL for Beginners
By: Dumas Walker to POINDEXTER FORTRAN on Fri Dec 06 2019 06:17 pm

I never saw a COBOL compiler, don't know if it was because of demand or hardware requirements - trying to think about the amount of work to get from COBOL to X86 assembly boggles the mind.

There was not a free one I know of, but IBM/MicroFocus had one. I bought a copy several years ago. IIRC, it would run on a 386. Not sure if it would run on less of a machine than that.

There are free ones now, for linux at least. I believe what they actually do is convert the COBOL source to another language and then compile it from there.

Transpilers often seem like the Great White Whale of computer science. It's so tempting to go down the path of...

If I just write a transpiler that turns this into an intermediate language that is more simple and elegant, I can easily write a compiler that handles that efficiently. Then, I can just advance that compiler and apply it to anything else I encounter in the future, just by writing a simple transpiler. I mean

I suppose you could always try Euphoria :-P
http://www.rapideuphoria.com/

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Re: Re: COBOL for Beginners
By: smartyhall to Grease on Sat Dec 07 2019 04:04 am

EBCDIC - Extended Binary Coded Decimal
a.k.a. Yet another bad idea in service of "customer retention." lol
I really should give FORTRAN another go. In any case, I long to one day have enough room for a card punch of my verry own. I've just about given up on my childhood dream of owning a fully-functional UNIVAC with drum storage though.

Our high school had two of the machines. We would wait to type our cards. It never failed that you would be behind that guy that would hunt and peck on the keys. Unfortunately, that guy was me.

Grease
darmatt.synchro.net

...I want to write a mystery novel...or do I?

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smartyhall wrote to Grease <=-

EBCDIC - Extended Binary Coded Decimal

I always thought it stood for "Erase Backup, Chew Disk, Ignite Cards". For obvious reasons, only IBM used it. 8)

I really should give FORTRAN another go. In any case, I long to one day have enough room for a card punch of my verry own. I've just about
given up on my childhood dream of owning a fully-functional UNIVAC with drum storage though.

You keep giving me ideas. Stop it.

I lucked out today and the RS-232 HAT I purchased worked like a charm and I was able to connect my VT-320 terminal to one of my Raspberry PIs. I have a little configuring to do (install curses) to play my terminal games.

But now I was to write some FORTRAN just for fun.

I already got the CBM BASIC interpreter running on it. Not quite like a PET/C64, but pretty close.


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