What are
/r/cobol's
favorite Products & Services?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
The most popular Products mentioned in /r/cobol:
The most popular Services mentioned in /r/cobol:
SourceForge
Zeus IDE
Visual Studio Code
tutorialspoint
The most popular reviews in /r/cobol:
I would second u/_NetNomad. I just picked up Murach's Mainframe COBOL off Amazon, and it is wonderful.
The trunk snapshot is for the very old GnuCOBOL 1.0 release. Here's a link to the up-to-date gnu-cobol-2.0 branch source tree. Click download snapshot there to get the actual latest version. (Hopefully we'll add clear instructions for this soon; there's someone complaining about this right now in the Bug-GnuCOBOL mailing list.)
Have you installed flex? It's needed to generate parser code. If you have, the error is probably due to the trunk branch's out-of-date ./configure.
Can you try compiling and testing again using the tarball attached to this post in GnuCOBOL discussion forum? It might fix those "unable to parse test group" warnings. You'll also need this updated version of libcob/common.h (apparently this didn't get into the tarball).
I have to say again how grateful I am for your help with this. MinGW has always been difficult to set up due to a lack of testing and I appreciate that it is quite tedious to re-compiling GnuCOBOL again and again to help identify bugs.
I take it you've been following the reasonably up-to-date MinGW build guide? If so, try asking on the GnuCOBOL discussion board and the devs can help.
I bought this book, back in the day, when I was trying to go the other direction. Might try looking into something like this, as there will likely be more resources.
https://www.amazon.com/Java-COBOL-Programmers-Programming-Byrne/dp/1584505656
I actually did take COBOL in school back in the 80's but never used it. There's all this talk about COBOL programmers being in demand so I've been brushing up my COBOL skills as well.
I can't speak to the mainframe part, but if you just want a compiler to practice with, you can use GnuCOBOL on Linux. You can use Visual Studio Code for an editor and get syntax highlighting for COBOL even :)
I install Linux into VirtualBox VM's under Windows...it's not hard to do if you have enough CPU, disk space and RAM.
This link describes how to setup and use GNU Cobol with Zeus:
http://www.zeusedit.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7174
> as a safety precaution
Zeus is just a text editor/IDE, but unfortunately, there is a similarly named, but totally unrelated ZeuS virus.
In any case your virus scanner will always give Zeus the text editor a clean bill of health.
Jussi Jumppanen
Author: Zeus IDE
Could I reasonably buckle down, get http://www.amazon.com/Murachs-Mainframe-COBOL-Mike-Murach/dp/1890774243/ , get a mainframe emulator and get a job in 6 months after studying? I'll relocate to Alaska if need be.