Re: [open-cobol-list] Still having problems installing open cobol

[Dave Stratford]

address@hidden wrote:
> Dave after thinking about your situation, I thought that you may
> appreciate some more information so that you can better evaluate
>  OpenCobol.

Thank you.

> You may wish to read the post about OpenCobol Viability on the forum at
> opencobol.org.

Okay, will do.

> We are a 35+ year old shop that still writes a lot of Cobol.  Over the
> years we have stayed away from most of the newer (post 1960's) features
> like Screen Section and Report Writer and Communications Section.  As
> such we use Cobol in a rather vanilla fashion.

Historically I've used ICL VME cobol almost exclusively, which is a cobol
74 variant, so I'm used to coding with lesser facilities, I've even
briefly used something called CIS cobol back in about 1982 which was so
primitive it did not have either 'AND' or 'OR'.

> We use MySQL with OpenCobol with great success.  SQL statements are
> rather long and cumbersome and I am working with my team to minimize
> their use of more complex features (like Joins, summing) in their SELECT
> statements.
> I am encouraging them to take the attitude of  "just give me the records
> and let me do the work myself).   We seem to be writing code faster  this
> way.

I understand what you mean. I use IDMSX rather than SQL with cobol, but I
do now use MySQL with PERL.

> We are afraid of ISAM.  We have no experience with any of the variants
> available, but have been scared off by rumors of data loss and corruption,
> although we have no proof of these situations.

Oh gosh. I've been using ISAM files since 1981, and in all the variants of
cobol I've used in the past, have never had an issue. I'll have a play
with ISAM in Opencobol and let you know.

> In short we try to rely on our own code instead of a facility that may not
> be implemented the same way by different compiler suppliers.
>
> Our environment is Debian Linux, OpenCobol 1.1, MySQL, and our CGI
> handler.
>
> Good luck!

Any ideas what:

AMEXPLODE.COB:26: Error: syntax error, unexpected "Identifier", expecting
DEBUGGING

might mean? Does 26 refer to line 26 of the source code?

Thank you.

Dave

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