Actually you just must be willing to learn. After 35+ years of mainframe assembler and COBOL work for Florida Power and then Micro Focus, I started my own company and decided to learn Java on my own just using the Interent, J2SE, and Eclipse. The first 6 months was painful constantly looking up library class methods in the online J2SE docs. But after that Java became a very powerful new tool and I love the Exclipse interactive source debugger. The best part is that it is all free open source and just keeps getting better.
Next I decided to replace my ancient 1985 shareware PC/370 tool with a new open source java based z390 Portable Mainframe Assembler Tool which now after 5 years has matured and is HLASM compatible supporting all the latest z9/z10 problem state instructions including HFP, BFP, DFP, 64 bit instructions etc. z390 also now includes structured programming extensions built into the macro processor supporting structured conditional macro code which in turn has allowed me to develop the following zcobol compiler. Note PC/370 was originally written in 1982 for z80 chip running CP/M using a package called EDIT-80 from a startup company in Redmond called Microsoft. (I still have the brown manual and 8" floppy it came on which might be worth something on Ebay someday - I also have a manual for Microsoft OS/2 before they sold it to IBM). Later it was ported to 8086 using MASM and became PC/370. The z80 was a cool chip with index registers and I loved learning how to program it in very basic assembler. Almost 2 years ago now I came up with an idea of how to translate COBOL source into HLASM compatible assembler macro call source program source using a relatively simple Java class program zc390.java/class which uses the very powerful Java regular expression parser library class and methods. Since then zcobol has evelved into an actual COBOL compiler that is structured conditional macro assembler based and generates HLASM assembler source with all the data field labels and paragraph names for readability. There are now demo and regression test programs plus 13 EXEC CICS COBOL transaction programs which you can compile and execute on Windows or Linux using z390 and zcobol for free. All you need is the latest z390 download from www.z390.org. There is InstallShield version for windows and flat file version for Linux both in zip files. Visit www.zcobol.org for more documentation and NIST test results. Also check out www.zpar.org for some new utilities. The zcobol compiler now compiles 408 of the NIST COBOL 1985 test suite programs with no assembler errors and MNOTE messages for as yet unsupported features. The data division translation is beginning to stabilize so you are welcome to try compiling any of your COBOL programs and send me any that are still generating unexpected assembler errors or MNOTES from the WS or GEN_WS conditional macros which support the data division. There is still much to be done, but it has come a long way. You can use z390 and zcobol to simply compile and run COBOL programs on WIndows or Linux. If you want to learn Java you can also dive into the open source for all the java programs in the z390.jar including: 1. z390.java - swing GUI interface for running z390 and zcobol 2. mz390.java - macro processor which calls az390 assembler 3. az390.java - assembler 4. lz390.java - linker 5. ez390.java - execution monitor 6. pz390.java - execution processor with all z9/z10 problem state opcodes 7. sz390.java - execution runtime with all svc support for I/O, GETMAIN, etc. 8. zc390.java - reguluar expression bases CBL to MLC translator If you are not learning, you are dying. Don Higgins d...@higgins.net ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
