Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Converting C# to COBOL

Description

I did a previous article, (August 22, 2009) on converting the many C# examples to COBOL. At the time there were a few examples out in the world of how to perform this conversion. Since that article has been written more and more examples have been popping up.

In this article I'd like to introduce you to a co-worker of mine who has presented what I believe to be the ultimate wall chart. This article is intended to be used as a model for you to follow when you run into a C# example and need to convert it to COBOL.

Visual COBOL!

I recently published a blog about a new product being introduced by Micro Focus called 'Visual COBOL'. Visual COBOL will be a whole new product from Micro Focus, not a rebranded current version of one of the compilers. Visual COBOL will have new syntax available that will make coding COBOL in the .NET environment much simpler and stream lined. In my previous article I proposed creating two projects, one in COBOL and the other in either C# or VB.NET. This was to enable you to learn the art of utilizing, and hopefully understanding, the realm of .NET namespaces and classes. By using the other .NET languages you could see how the syntax was composed and then translate that into COBOL. I used this method because there was no really good reference material out there at the time.

Well guess what...someone created what I believe is the ultimate syntax example. A while ago I was in Newbury at our headquarters testing the latest release of Visual COBOL. I had the pleasure of meeting some very talented developers. One of them, Dr. Alex Turner, had mentioned he composed a chart showing the syntactical differences between C#, VB.NET and COBOL. NET. My initial thought was that's cool, a couple more examples that we can use and blog about. Man was I ever wrong! Alex, I publicly apologize for underestimating your resourcefulness!

Syntactical Differences, or the "Mother of all Syntax Charts"

Read more: C# Corner

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