GnuCOBOL
| Original author(s) | Keisuke Nishida, Roger While |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Edward Hart, Sergey Kashyrin, Ron Norman, Simon Sobisch |
| Initial release | January 25, 2002 |
| Stable release |
OpenCOBOL 1.1, GNU Cobol 1.1 / February 24, 2009
|
| Preview release |
GnuCOBOL 2.0, GnuCOBOL 2 with Report Writer, GnuCOBOL C++ / July 15, 2015
|
| Repository | sourceforge |
| Development status | Stable |
| Written in | C, with a C++ branch |
| Operating system | POSIX |
| Platform | Cross-platform |
| Size | 1 MB |
| Available in | English, Japanese, Spanish |
| Type | Programming Language |
| License | GPL with runtime libraries under LGPL. |
| Website | sourceforge |
GnuCOBOL (formerly OpenCOBOL, and for a short time known as GNU Cobol) is a free implementation of the COBOL programming language. Originally designed by Keisuke Nishida, lead development was taken up by Roger While. Latest developments are now led by Simon Sobisch, Sergey Kashyrin and Ron Norman.
While working with Rildo Pragana on TinyCOBOL, Keisuke decided to attempt a COBOL compiler suitable for integration with gcc. This soon became the OpenCOBOL project. Keisuke worked as the lead developer until 2005 and version 0.31. Roger then took over as lead and released OpenCOBOL 1.0 on December 27th, 2007. Work on the OpenCOBOL 1.1 pre-release continued until February 2009. In May 2012, active development was moved to SourceForge, and the pre-release of February 2009 was marked as a release. In late September 2013, OpenCOBOL was accepted as a GNU Project, renamed to GNU Cobol, and then finally to GnuCOBOL in September 2014. Ron Norman has added a Report Writer module as a branch of GnuCobol 2.0, and Sergey Kashyrin has developed a version that uses C++ intermediates instead of C.
Transfer of copyrights to the Free Software Foundation over GnuCOBOL source code (including versions with GNU Cobol and OpenCOBOL spellings) was finalized on June 17th, 2015.
While striving to keep in line with COBOL Standards up to the current COBOL 2014 specification, and also to include features common in existing compilers, the developers do not claim any level of standards conformance. Even so, the 1.1 release candidate passes over 9,000 of the tests included in the NIST COBOL 85 test suite.
GnuCOBOL translates a COBOL program (source code) into a C program. The C program can then be compiled into the actual code used by the computer (object code) or into a library where other programs can call (link to) it. Under UNIX and similar operating systems (such as Linux) the GNU C compiler is used. For Windows, Microsoft’s Visual Studio Express package provides the C compiler. The two step compilation is usually performed by a single command, but an option exists to allow the programmer to stop compilation after the C code has been generated.
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