seanstickle

I finally got around to installing a COBOL compiler on my computer here at home. I downloaded OpenCOBOL which built from source with no problems on my Mac. I went ahead and wrote the typical “Hello World” program to test that everything compiled and installed correctly:

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000001 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
000002 PROGRAM-ID. hello.
000003 PROCEDURE DIVISION.
000004 DISPLAY "Hello World!".
000005 STOP RUN.

And compiled it:

cobc -x hello.cob


And ran it:

./hello
Hello World!


Brilliant. Now I need to find a good book on the COBOL language so I can get down the syntax. And also find some fairly sizable COBOL code that I can read through to get a sense of idiomatic COBOL.

Fun!