Introduction

As I have recently written (November 2007, Building an Early Warning System to Enable COBOL Compiler Migration), there are sites that will be compelled to migrate older COBOL programs to Enterprise COBOL simply because they must run the latest version of DB2 and CICS. If that’s the case at your site, what have you done to help get the applications programming staff ready to do the work? I was presented with this challenge at a client site and decided to follow a standard project approach:  read more »

Programmers who evolved with Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL) are retiring from the workforce, and businesses must compete for a shrinking pool of knowledgeable technicians. In a paper for Gartner Research, analyst Dale Vecchio makes the following observations (Vecchio, p. 1)[1]:  read more »

To mark my sixth anniversary of writing for NaSPA, I decided to revisit my first article and revamp it for a new audience. This article examines how one site incorporated one of the features of their change management system with the features of their dump analysis tool to help applications programmers determine the cause of development and production abends.  read more »

COBOL source code migration is inevitable. In the near future, whether your site has VS COBOL II programs or still has OS/VS COBOL programs, if you change your source code during maintenance, you must migrate the compiler to Enterprise COBOL.  read more »

Scope

This first article in the series will explain the basics of the COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) programming language. If you have no previous coding experience, COBOL is a good way to get started. If you do have coding experience, COBOL will probably be easy to learn.
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Imagine trying to find a short circuit in the telephone wiring of your building and in the process of searching for the guilty wire you discover that two to three sets of old wiring have been left behind from the last two wiring jobs. You either have to find and remove the unused wiring or test all of the wires, knowing that much of it is not even being used.
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Let me start off right away by saying what this article isn’t. It isn’t going to describe a 1950s-like prediction of data centers run by robots, nor is it going to describe the use of nano-technology to create a sentient array of devices.  read more »