Background
I wrote this document to complement my video Installing GNUCobol on Windows which you can find on the Cobol Ninja YouTube channel.
If you are new to Cobol, you can start off with the Hello Cobol World video, which goes into the bare basics needed to develop your first Cobol program.
The Hello Cobol World program
Our goal is not to just install, but to become Cobol programmers. So after installing all that we need, to get started, we will edit, compile and run the following program, which will display “Hello Cobol World!”
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. CLS01EX01.
ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
DATA DIVISION.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
DISPLAY 'HELLO COBOL WORLD!'.
STOP RUN.
Step 1- Installing GnuCobol
To download the GnuCOBOL compiler, we need to go to Arnold Trembley’s GnuCOBOL Downloads page, and scroll down to the stable 64-bit version for Windows, as seen here
After downloading, we have 2 things to do:
1. Create a new folder c:\gnuCobol for the GnuCOBOL compiler
2. Extract the GnuCOBOL compiler into c:\gnuCobol
The c:\gnuCobol folder after download and extracting into the folder
Step 2 - Installing Visual Studio Code
To download Visual Studio Code, we will go to the we need to go to Visual Studio Code download page as seen here, and download the 64-bit User installer for Windows
Accept all defaults and follow the installation process. At the end, let it launch Visual Studio Code.
Initial launch of Visual Studio Code
To complete our preparations for using GnuCOBOL on Windows, we need to do the following:
1. Point VSCode to the GnuCOBOL folder
- In the top menu, click on File
- Click on Open Folder
- Click on the new folder c:\gnuCobol
- Click on the Select Folder button
The VS Code editor should display the new folder c:\gnuCobol on the left side, as seen here
2. Add the CLS01EX01.cob source file
- If you hover on the line where the GNUCOBOL folder appears in the VSCode explorer, you will notice icons to the right. The first is for creating a new file in the folder.
- When you click on the New File icon, a field will open in the folder, prompting for the new file name.
- Type CLS01EX01.cob and click outside the field.
- In the GNUCOBOL folder you will notice the new file CLS01EX01.cob that we just created.
The c:\gnuCobol folder after download and extracting into the folder
When you click on the file name, the edit pane for this source file will open in VS Code.
VSCode after clicking on new file CLS01EX01.con
3. Add VSCode Cobol extensions
We’re going to add two extensions that were made to support Cobol development in VSCode. This will allow the editor to alert us for syntax errors and more – for example, if we reference a variable which is not defined in the program. There are many different extensions, for now I would start out with these two.
- On the left menu, click on the Extensions icon
Notice the Extensions icon on the lower left
- In the Search field above, type “cobol”, and click on the first extension
- In the Search field above, type “cobol”, and click on the first extension
