Tuesday, December 30, 2008

zcobol Portable Mainframe COBOL Compiler www.zcobol.org

Come to SHARE session 8194 on what's new with z390 scheduled for Tuesday, March 3, 2009 in Austin, TX 8:00 AM to learn about a new z390 open source structured conditional macro assembler based tool - zcobol portable mainframe COBOL compiler. The new zcobol compiler supports multiple COBOL dialects such as IBM Enterprise COBOL Micro Focus COBOL, and has options to generate any one of several target language executable programs. The current target languages include HLASM compatible mainframe assembler for IBM z9/z10 processors, Java for any J2SE platform, C++ for any Windows platform, or HLA/MASM assembler for any Intel platform. The initial open source zcobol tool release included with z390 starting March 3, 2009 will primarily focus on compiling COBOL to HLASM compatible mainframe assembler that can be run using z390 on any J2SE platform or can be ported to z9/z10 for native mainframe speed. The zcobol compile generates intermediate target language source code which includes all the COBOL data names and paragraph names for use in debugging when required. Debugging options include paragraph trace, macro expansion trace, and execution trace The generated code includes support for static and dynamic linking of both COBOL and assembler programs and supports EXEC CICS and SOA extensions for SEND/RECEIVE.

To learn more about zcobol and get the latest updates visit http://www.zcobol.org join the zcobol user discussion group, and come to SHARE.

Don Higgins
don@higgins.net