opencobol.add1tocobol.comOpenCOBOL FAQ

Navigation » 1 ¶ Status This is a 1.1 final of the . Sourced at ocfaq.rst . Courtesty of ReStructuredText , Sphinx and Pygments . ocfaq.pdf is also available, using rst2latex and then pdflatex . A Sphinx generated Portable Document Format version is stored http://opencobol.add1tocobol.com/OpenCOBOLFAQ.pdf This FAQ is more than a FAQ and less than a FAQ. Website favicon by Mark James, help.png from the FAMFAMFAM Silk icon set. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/ “COBOL Warriors” image Copyright © 2008 Robert Saczkowski. Banner courtesy of the GIMP , Copyright © 2008-2013 Brian Tiffin and both are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ OpenCOBOL has been renamed to GNU Cobol and is now proudly a GNU free software project. http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnucobol Authors: Brian Tiffin [btiffin] Answers, quotes and contributions: John Ellis [jrls_swla] , Vincent Coen, Jim Currey, Bill Klein [wmklein] , Ganymede, Simon Sobisch [human] , Rildo Pragana, Sergey Kashyrin, Federico Priolo, Frank Swarbrick, Angus, DamonH, Parhs, Gerald Chudyk Compiler by: Roger While [Roger] , Keisuke Nishida [Keisuke] , (with the invaluable assistance of many others) Special credits to Gary Cutler author of the OpenCOBOL Programmers Guide Joseph James Frantz for hosting and advocacy [aoirthoir] Version: 1.1, October 19th, 2013 Status: Final. Superceded by GNU Cobol Copyright: Copyright © 2008-2013 Brian Tiffin License: Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License . ChangeLog: ChangeLog Note Regarding COBOL Standards, Official COBOL Standards: There are many references to standards in this document. Very few of them are technically correct references. Apologies to all the hard working men and women of the technical committees for this unintentional slight. For specific details on what wordings should be used please see What are the Official COBOL Standards? OpenCOBOL Contents 1 1.1 What is OpenCOBOL? 1.2 What is COBOL? 1.3 How is OpenCOBOL licensed? 1.4 What platforms are supported by OpenCOBOL? 1.5 Are there pre-built OpenCOBOL packages 1.6 What is the most recent version of OpenCOBOL? 1.7 How complete is OpenCOBOL? 1.8 Will I be amazed by OpenCOBOL? 1.9 Who do I thank for OpenCOBOL? 1.10 Does OpenCOBOL include a Test Suite? 1.11 Does OpenCOBOL pass the NIST Test Suite? 1.12 What about OpenCOBOL and benchmarks? 1.13 Can OpenCOBOL be used for CGI? 1.14 Does OpenCOBOL support a GUI? 1.15 Does OpenCOBOL have an IDE? 1.16 Can OpenCOBOL be used for production applications? 1.17 Where can I get more information about COBOL? 1.18 Where can I get more information about OpenCOBOL? 1.19 Can I help out with the OpenCOBOL project? 1.20 Is there an OpenCOBOL mailing list? 1.21 Where can I find more information about COBOL standards? 1.22 Can I see the OpenCOBOL source codes? 1.23 What happened to opencobol.org? 1.24 What is COBOL in Latin? 1.25 Where can I find open COBOL source code? 1.26 Do you know any good jokes? 2 History 2.1 What is the history of COBOL? 2.2 What are the Official COBOL Standards? 2.3 What is the development history of OpenCOBOL? 2.4 What is the current version of OpenCOBOL? 3 Using OpenCOBOL 3.1 How do I install OpenCOBOL? 3.2 What are the configure options available for building OpenCOBOL? 3.3 Does OpenCOBOL have any other dependencies? 3.4 How does the OpenCOBOL compiler work? 3.5 What is cobc? 3.6 What is cobcrun? 3.7 What is cob-config? 3.8 What compiler options are supported? 3.9 What dialects are supported by OpenCOBOL? 3.10 What extensions are used if cobc is called with/without “-ext” for COPY 3.11 What are the OpenCOBOL compile time configuration files? 3.12 Does OpenCOBOL work with make? 3.13 Do you have a reasonable source code skeleton for OpenCOBOL? 3.14 Can OpenCOBOL be used to write command line stdin, stdout filters? 3.15 How do you print to printers with OpenCOBOL? 3.16 Can I run background processes using OpenCOBOL? 3.17 Is there OpenCOBOL API documentation? 3.18 How do I use LD_RUN_PATH with OpenCOBOL? 3.19 What GNU build tool options are available when building OpenCOBOL? 3.20 Why don’t I see any output from my OpenCOBOL program? 4 Reserved Words 4.1 What are the OpenCOBOL RESERVED WORDS? 4.2 Does OpenCOBOL implement any Intrinsic FUNCTIONs? 4.3 Can you clarify the use of FUNCTION in OpenCOBOL? 4.4 What is the difference between the LENGTH verb and FUNCTION LENGTH? 4.5 What STOCK CALL LIBRARY does OpenCOBOL offer? 4.6 What are the XF4, XF5, and X91 routines? 4.7 What is CBL_OC_NANOSLEEP OpenCOBOL library routine? 4.8 How do you use C$JUSTIFY? 4.9 What preprocessor directives are supported by OpenCOBOL? 5 Features and extensions 5.1 How do I use OpenCOBOL for CGI? 5.2 What is ocdoc? 5.3 What is CBL_OC_DUMP? 5.4 Does OpenCOBOL support any SQL databases? 5.5 Does OpenCOBOL support ISAM? 5.6 Does OpenCOBOL support modules? 5.7 What is COB_PRE_LOAD? 5.8 What is the OpenCOBOL LINKAGE SECTION for? 5.9 What does the -fstatic-linkage OpenCOBOL compiler option do? 5.10 Does OpenCOBOL support Message Queues? 5.11 Can OpenCOBOL interface with Lua? 5.12 Can OpenCOBOL use ECMAScript? 5.13 Can OpenCOBOL use JavaScript? 5.14 Can OpenCOBOL interface with Scheme? 5.15 Can OpenCOBOL interface with Tcl/Tk? 5.16 Can OpenCOBOL interface with Falcon PL? 5.17 Can OpenCOBOL interface with Ada? 5.18 Can OpenCOBOL interface with Vala? 5.19 Can OpenCOBOL interface with S-Lang? 5.20 Can the GNAT Programming Studio be used with OpenCOBOL? 5.21 Does OpenCOBOL support SCREEN SECTION? 5.22 What are the OpenCOBOL SCREEN SECTION colour values? 5.23 Does OpenCOBOL support CRT STATUS? 5.24 What is CobCurses? 5.25 What is CobXRef? 5.26 Does OpenCOBOL implement Report Writer? 5.27 Does OpenCOBOL implement LINAGE? 5.28 Can I use ctags with OpenCOBOL? 5.29 What about debugging OpenCOBOL programs? 5.30 Is there a C interface to OpenCOBOL? 5.31 What are some idioms for dealing with C char * data from OpenCOBOL? 5.32 Does OpenCOBOL support COPY includes? 5.33 Does OpenCOBOL support WHEN-COMPILED? 5.34 What is PI in OpenCOBOL? 5.35 Does OpenCOBOL support the Object features of the 2002 standard? 5.36 Does OpenCOBOL implement PICTURE 78? 5.37 Does OpenCOBOL implement CONSTANT? 5.38 What source formats are accepted by OpenCOBOL? 5.39 Does OpenCOBOL support continuation lines? 5.40 Does OpenCOBOL support string concatenation? 5.41 Does OpenCOBOL support D indicator debug lines? 5.42 Does OpenCOBOL support mixed case source code? 5.43 What is the shortest OpenCOBOL program? 5.44 What is the shortest Hello World program in OpenCOBOL? 5.45 How do I get those nifty sequential sequence numbers in a source file? 5.46 Is there a way to count trailing spaces in data fields using OpenCOBOL? 5.47 Is there a way to left justify an edited numeric field? 5.48 Is there a way to detemermine when OpenCOBOL is running ASCII or EBCDIC? 5.49 Is there a way to determine when OpenCOBOL is running on 32 or 64 bits? 5.50 Does OpenCOBOL support recursion? 5.51 Does OpenCOBOL capture arithmetic overflow? 5.52 Can OpenCOBOL be used for plotting? 5.53 Does OpenCOBOL support the GIMP ToolKit, GTK+? 5.54 What is ocsort? 5.55 When is Easter? 5.56 Does Vim support OpenCOBOL? 5.57 What is w3m? 5.58 What is COB_LIBRARY_PATH? 5.59 Can OpenCOBOL interface with Rexx? 5.60 Does OpenCOBOL support table SEARCH and SORT? 5.61 Can OpenCOBOL handle named pipes? 5.62 Can OpenCOBOL interface with ROOT/CINT? 5.63 Can OpenCOBOL be used to serve HTTP? 5.64 Is there a good SCM tool for OpenCOBOL? 5.65 Does OpenCOBOL interface with FORTRAN? 5.66 Does OpenCOBOL interface with APL? 5.67 Does OpenCOBOL interface with J? 5.68 What is CO...