COBOL Tutorial Series: Developing Without a Mainframe

Hello, I’m Duke

COBOL – a 65-year-old language, yet it is used in large financial and banking systems.

Learning it is relatively difficult because it is little known and is almost as old as a human lifetime. Besides, in the past, we could only program on mainframe systems—something that individual programmers could hardly access.

But, today I will guide you on how to program it on personal PCs running Windows 11 operating system, yeah.

To run COBOL code on Windows 11 without the need for a mainframe, you need:

1. Download and Install the Visual Studio Code here
2. Install the following extensions: bitlang.cobol-themes, bitlang.cobol, ms-vscode-remote.remote-wsl
3. Install WSL follow the instructions here
4. Install Debian on Windows Store here

Once installed, you need to install and setup a few things

1. Update Debian

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y

2. Install GnuCOBOL Compiler

sudo apt install gnucobol4 -y

Okay, we are done with the installation and configuration, now let’s get down to writing code and compiling.

Firstly, create a hello.cbl file and then write the following code

 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. PROGRAM-ID. HELLO-WORLD. PROCEDURE DIVISION. DISPLAY 'Hello, I am Duke!'. STOP RUN.

On Visual Studio Code the code will look like this

Then, open Visual Studio Code terminal and run the following command

cobc -x hello.cbl

The -x flag tells cobc to create an executable.
After running this command, a file named hello will be created.

Now run the command below to execute

./hello

and you will see the text Hello, I am Duke! appear on the terminal window