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Not sure if this is the right forum for this question but the COBOL forum does not seem to be active.

If I want to write OO COBOL programs (not .NET programs) is there an OO Standard to which MF compilers adhere? I have an old copy of MF Object COBOL (32 bit) and also Visual COBOL PE, which, I presume, supports OO programming. To what extent do MF compliers such as the two mentioned adhere to any standard and/or provide extensions to the standard?

Thanks

Paul

 

 

 

Not sure if this is the right forum for this question but the COBOL forum does not seem to be active.

If I want to write OO COBOL programs (not .NET programs) is there an OO Standard to which MF compilers adhere? I have an old copy of MF Object COBOL (32 bit) and also Visual COBOL PE, which, I presume, supports OO programming. To what extent do MF compliers such as the two mentioned adhere to any standard and/or provide extensions to the standard?

Thanks

Paul

 

 

 

Please include full product information, including version platform, in your questions. In the case of Visual COBOL, is it VC for Eclipse or for Visual Studio? We can't answer accurately if we don't know what you're running, or in what environment.

Native OO COBOL has been somewhat less successful in the market than traditional procedural COBOL, and my impression is that it has also received less attention from developers than managed OO COBOL. Consequently you won't find a lot of discussion about it here or in other forums.

Regarding native OO COBOL in general, the Visual COBOL product documentation includes reference information and a link to this online book:

supportline.microfocus.com/.../Intro_to_OO_Programming_for_COBOL_Developers.pdf

The product documentation also refers native-OO-COBOL developers to the OO COBOL class library documentation, which is in a separate file, nxrclr.chm.

As noted in the product documentation, Micro Focus Visual COBOL includes some but not all of the COBOL 2002 standard (ISO/IEC 1989:2002), which defines standard OO COBOL (along with the 2002 version of procedural COBOL). It also includes extensions to COBOL 2002. For example, if you consult the product documentation topic on Predefined Object References (General Reference > COBOL Language Reference > Part 1 Concepts > Language Fundamentals > Object-oriented COBOL Concepts), you'll see that Micro Focus adds the non-standard SELFCLASS predefined reference:

www.microfocus.com/.../HRLHLHCPRO01U923.html

As far as I know, there's no summary of what Micro Focus COBOL implements of the 2002 OO COBOL standard, what it does not implement, and what extensions it adds.

Not sure if this is the right forum for this question but the COBOL forum does not seem to be active.

If I want to write OO COBOL programs (not .NET programs) is there an OO Standard to which MF compilers adhere? I have an old copy of MF Object COBOL (32 bit) and also Visual COBOL PE, which, I presume, supports OO programming. To what extent do MF compliers such as the two mentioned adhere to any standard and/or provide extensions to the standard?

Thanks

Paul

 

 

 

Michael

Thanks for the reply, which seems to answer my questions. Just for the record I have Object COBOL 4.0.38 32 bit character development environmant and Visual COBOL PE for Visual Studio both running on WIndows 7. I will examine the various documentation links that you mentioned.

Paul

Not sure if this is the right forum for this question but the COBOL forum does not seem to be active.

If I want to write OO COBOL programs (not .NET programs) is there an OO Standard to which MF compilers adhere? I have an old copy of MF Object COBOL (32 bit) and also Visual COBOL PE, which, I presume, supports OO programming. To what extent do MF compliers such as the two mentioned adhere to any standard and/or provide extensions to the standard?

Thanks

Paul

 

 

 

Hi Paul,

I would definitely recommend that you look more closely at the Visual COBOL product as the Object COBOL product has not been supported in like 15 years. Object COBOL was released prior to the general availability of the ISO2002 standard so does not include that functionality as part of the product.


Visual COBOL is the current product release from Micro Focus.

Not sure if this is the right forum for this question but the COBOL forum does not seem to be active.

If I want to write OO COBOL programs (not .NET programs) is there an OO Standard to which MF compilers adhere? I have an old copy of MF Object COBOL (32 bit) and also Visual COBOL PE, which, I presume, supports OO programming. To what extent do MF compliers such as the two mentioned adhere to any standard and/or provide extensions to the standard?

Thanks

Paul

 

 

 

Chris

You are correct, of course. I had forgotten that Object COBOL only had some support for the earlier OO Standard. Thanks.
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