[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 20 January 2011]

Can someone detail the emphasis being placed on support for OO COBOL in native environments? (ie. Win32, Unix).

I would really like to embrace the OO support but have a couple of major concerns:

1. OO documentation seems to almost be an 'addendum' in R2 release

In earlier product releases OO support was documented in its own manual with some examples and reasonable explanations of the functionality. That manual has disappeared and been replaced with pretty thin docs in R2. Haven't yet looked at R3.


2. Is this going to be enhanced in the same way as we are seeing for the .Net environment?

At the moment the native syntax is extremely verbose and nowhere near as evolved as what was demonstrated earlier today.

Are there plans in place to bring some of this functionality down to the non-.Net environments?


Thanks

Hi Greg,

1. Documentation is an area where we know we've got work to do. The OO syntax is being rolled into the mainstream documentation but it is still not as complete as we'd like it. In reality, I think a lot of people are really looking for good tutorials and demonstrations rather than abstract syntax charts and our intent is to use this Community to collect and publish a lot of that kind of material.

2. Our focus is on making COBOL as natural as possible for the .NET and JVM frameworks which, by their nature, are OO oriented. Although the Micro Focus Class Library was pretty useful, it's nowhere near as functionally rich or high-performing as those provided by .NET or JVM. Our focus will be on making those Class Libraries easier to use within in COBOL and to "smooth out" the variations between the different platforms. Some of this has started to appear in R3, for example the "string" class and "&" operator but there's a lot more we can do in this area.

If you haven't got it yet, I recommend you get a trial copy of R3 and start experimenting with the new syntax.

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