On Sat, 14 Mar 2020 11:33:09 -0400, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:

> On Sat, 14 Mar 2020 01:08:21 -0000 (UTC), Martin Gregorie
>  declaimed the following:
>>I see from the above IBM reference that mixed case (and all lower case?)
>>is now accepted in COBOL source code. When was that standardised. Asking
>>because I haven't written standards-compliant COBOL since 1984, apart
>>from a little distinctly non-standard Tandem S-COBOL.
>>
>>
>  Not sure about lower case, but COBOL-2002, as I recall, introduced
> "free-form" source -- no longer requiring top-level statements start in
> 8-11, and sublevels to start in 12+
>
Thanks - if I ever write it again, I'll use one of the Linux ports and
see what that can handle.

> * Both texts included a version of Fujitsu COBOL v4 (Compiler, IDE,
> support for Visual BASIC, preliminary OO features, and a capability for
> COBOL applications with GUIs [PowerCOBOL] -- but did not include a
> distributable run-time library)... Unfortunately, it won't install on
> anything newer than W98.
>
Hmmm, guessing here, but the ancestor of this might well be ICL2900
COBOL, since Fujitsu picked up support for that kit when our goverment of
the day let ICL crumble into ruin. Similarly I believe that VME/B is
still alive and kicking, running under an emulator on X86 hardware.


--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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