I'm completely new to COBOL, and I'm wondering: There seems to be no difference between DISPLAY "foo" and DISPLAY "foo". What does the dot at the end of a line actually do? When should I u...

I have this very simple dummy COBOL program which does a dummy COMPUTE and displays the result. ID DIVISION. PROGRAM-ID. DUMMYPGM. DATA DIVISION. WORKING-STORAGE SECTION. 01 NUM-A PIC 9(3) VA...

Using GnuCOBOL 2.2.0 on Ubuntu 18.10. Working through 'Beginning COBOL for Programmers' by Michael Coughlan. GnuCOBOL has been compiling the book's examples without trouble up until Chapter 9, when...

I am learning COBOL just for the fun of it and now want to call C functions from my COBOL source (using GnuCOBOL). I can call C functions just fine, however I have a small problem with a function ...

I want to run this hello world program, in COBOL : Identification Division. program-id. HelloWorld. Procedure Division. Display 'Bonjour '. Display 'Comment allez vous ? ' . goback. But, I have ...

Is it possible to execute COBOL code without providing input files? I'm using cobc. I tried to pipe the code to the cobc process: $ cat my-input.cbl | cobc cobc: No input files To compile a fil...

I'm trying to make a very simple COBOL program. I've gotten my directory, configurations, etc. all set up, but when I go to compile it I get this error: sampleCOBOL.cbl: In paragraph 'Main-Paragra...

Something changed recently, I think. GnuCOBOL relies on dynamic linking, symbols looked up with dlsym at run-time. This CALL run-time support code has been in OpenCOBOL for some 7 years now. It no...

Why can I not do this nested perform loop in COBOL? If I put END-PERFORM. in any line sooner than where I have the last one just before EXIT PROGRAM - it works. But I need the program to display t...

I'm just learning COBOL; I'm writing a program that simply echos back user input. I have defined a variable as: User-Input PIC X(30). Later when I ACCEPT User-Input, then DISPLAY User-Input " pl...