Hello World in COBOL

By admin , 20 January 2025
COBOL: The Programming Dinosaur That Just Won't Die

Let’s talk about COBOL. Yes, you heard me right COBOL. That relic from the '60s that sounds more like a type of fancy pasta than a programming language. But don't let its age fool you. COBOL is like the grandpa who refuses to retire, but instead runs a marathon every year and is still better at math than you.

 

What Is COBOL?

COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) was born in 1959. It’s been around so long that, if COBOL were a person, it’d be eligible for senior discounts at pretty much any restaurant. It was designed to process large-scale business applications, and while it may seem like it’s been gathering dust in some forgotten corner of tech history, it’s still actively running in the background of many systems today. Banks, insurance companies, and government institutions still rely heavily on COBOL to power everything from ATM transactions to pension systems. Yeah, your bank might still use COBOL to process your money, and somehow, it's still working like a charm.

 
COBOL’s Role in the Modern World

Now, you might be thinking: "Why would anyone still use COBOL? Surely there are better, shinier, faster languages out there now!"

Well, yes, there are newer, more "fashionable" languages, but COBOL is like the dependable sedan of the programming world. Sure, it’s not flashy, but it gets the job done. Also, you don’t need to worry about "breaking" the car every other week (looking at you, modern JavaScript frameworks). COBOL is incredibly efficient at handling massive amounts of data – and that’s why it’s still used in sectors where reliability and performance are critical. In fact, about 70% of transactions in the world still pass through COBOL systems. It’s basically the invisible backbone of our digital economy. So, yes, it's old, but it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

 

GnuCOBOL: The Gateway to Your COBOL Adventures

So, what’s a curious coder to do if they want to dip their toes into the COBOL waters? Well, there’s a handy tool called GnuCOBOL. This open-source implementation of COBOL is like your personal time machine to the ‘60s, minus the awkward fashion choices. GnuCOBOL gives you all the functionality of COBOL without needing a mainframe (although if you can get your hands on one, that’d be pretty cool, too). You can install it on your local machine and start exploring COBOL’s archaic syntax while pretending to be the most futuristic tech wizard in the room.

 

In This Article

In the next few sections, I’m going to take you step-by-step through setting up GnuCOBOL on your machine. By the end of this, you'll not only have a working COBOL environment, but you’ll be one step closer to becoming the next COBOL whisperer, and who knows? You might just end up helping modernize a banking system or two.

Stay tuned for the installation steps, and prepare to see COBOL in a whole new light. One where it's not just a relic, but a powerful tool still holding down the fort in the world of business applications.

 

Setting up GnuCOBOL in Cygwin
  • Download Cygwin from the site http://www.cygwin.com/
  • Run the executable setup-x86_64.exe
  • Not all necessary packages are included by default. You will need to manually add following packages.  
    • make
    • libgmp-devel
    • libdb-devel
    • db
    • ncurses
    • ncurses-demo
    • libncurses-devel
    • autoconf
    • gcc-core
    • wget
  • Navigate to https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucobol/ and download GNUCOBOL to your cygwin directory, for example C:\cygwin64\home\<user>.
  • Decompress the 7z file you just downloaded.
    • 7z x gnucobol-3.2_win.7z
  • cd gnucobol-3.2_win
    chmod -R 775 ./*
    ./configure
    make
  • This is an optional step to ensure there are no issues with your environment.
    • make check
  • make install
  • Running the NIST (validation suite) verification tests
    • Information on running the validation suite is available in tests/cobol85/README.
    • cd tests/cobol85
    • make test
    • Results are available in summary.txt

 

Hello World!
  • Create the file helloworld.cob with the following code. File can be downloaded from helloworld.cob.
       Identification Division.
        Program-ID. sampleCOBOL.
        Data Division.
        Procedure Division.
        Main-Paragraph.
            Display "Hello World!"
            Stop Run.

 

  • Build your executable with this line.
    • cobc -x helloworld.cob
  • Finally run your Hello World program you just built.
    • ./helloworld.exe
  • This outputs
    • Hello World!

 

Generate c files from COBOL code
  • Call the same source code but with a -C parameter.
    • cobc -C helloworld.cob
  • This creates the .c and .h files.
  • To see the build steps you can run this command.
cobc -x -v -save-temp helloworld.cob
cobc (GnuCOBOL) 3.2.0
Built     Jan 13 2025 00:34:22  Packaged Jul 28 2023 17:02:56 UTC
C version "12.4.0"
loading standard configuration file 'default.conf'
command line:   cobc -x -v -save-temp helloworld.cob
preprocessing:  helloworld.cob -> helloworld.i
return status:  0
parsing:        helloworld.i (helloworld.cob)
return status:  0
translating:    helloworld.i -> helloworld.c (helloworld.cob)
executing:      gcc -c -pipe -I/usr/local/include -Wno-unused -fsigned-char
                -Wno-pointer-sign -o "helloworld.o" "helloworld.c"
return status:  0
executing:      gcc -Wl,--export-all-symbols -Wl,--enable-auto-import
                -Wl,--enable-auto-image-base -o "helloworld.exe"
                "helloworld.o" -L/usr/local/lib -lcob
return status:  0
  • The previous comannd shows you can build the generated c and h files in to an executable using these commands.
gcc -c -pipe -I/usr/local/include -Wno-unused -fsigned-char -Wno-pointer-sign -o "helloworld.o" "helloworld.c"
gcc -Wl,--export-all-symbols -Wl,--enable-auto-import -Wl,--enable-auto-image-base -o "helloworld.exe" "helloworld.o" -L/usr/local/lib -lcob

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