does anyone know of a cobol port to an commodore 6502 system

_________________
JMP $FFD2

A search for "Commodore Cobol" on ixquick.com (I don't use google, because of political, moral, and privacy issues) immediately turned up a ton of results. One of the first ones is this manual:
http://www.bombjack.org/commodore//appl ... System.pdf
Cobol for the Commodore 64
complete with editor, interpreter, and debugger
By K. A. Alexander
A Data Becker Product published by Abacus Software
163 pages

_________________
http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

I have Cobol for the Commodore 64 from Abacus which I don't use and I'm sorry I bought it. It is so large, unless you know what you are doing, you run out of memory trying to write a program that works.

_________________
x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

I only bought this book on COBOL to learn the language as people at the time told me I could make money writing programs in it.
I didn't know what I was doing wrong but I kept running out of memory and only the programs in the book would work.

I think you really need two disk drives with this language.

I can see why someone would be interested in 6502 and/or COBOL. But I have a hard time imagining a useful purpose for COBOL on the 6502

Garth, good to know I am not the only one avoiding G**gle (sometimes it feels that way). I actually most google domains blocked in my hosts file and use ghostery, noscript and self-destucting cookies to avoid being tracked, at least to some degree.

Ordinarily I would be concerned about being off-topic, but since we are being taken for a spin we might as well use these topics as we see fit.

I have no doubt the poster is looking for COBOL in order to run the most popular business applications. COBOL is peculiar in its English-like syntax designed for managers to be able to understand what the programmers are doing, and I am sure it's a perk even today. In the late 70's most of US banking applications ran on Apple ][ computers running COBOL. In the 80s due to the Y198x bug most big business applications were ported to Apple /// machines, where they still remain. I should update the wikipedia page.

_________________
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. ...Jan van de Snepscheut

Yes, I did some reading on it after the original post; but I have never had a boss want to see my code (although I've offered it, particularly when I was proud of how I did something). It sounds like Cobol is extremely memory-inefficient. Wikipedia says it was introduced in 1959, a few years after Fortran which I took in school 30-35 years ago when we had to write our programs on paper, take them to the computer room and sit at a card-punch machine



and transfer our creation to a stack of cards, then rubber-band them together with our name and account number and put them in a cubbyhole for the computer operator to run, then come back a couple of hours (a class or two) later to find out if they did it, and if so, see the printout of all the reasons it wouldn't run. It was like in the 1969 movie, "The computer wore tennis shoes," where Medfield College was given a computer, free, because it was already so outdated. In spite of how long ago these languages came out, apparently there have been a lot of modernizations; but who's using them now? I remember an engineering student maybe 15 years ago saying they were doing Fortran in school, and asking, "Is that what everyone in industry is using?" I had to break the bad (or should I say good) news to him: "Not at all."

_________________
http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

I was fibbing... Sorry, I mean to stick one of these in my last post.

COBOL is actually pretty good for what it was meant for - processing stacks of punchcards in a pretty efficient way.

Back in the day, a relative of mine was making a killing doing COBOL consulting. He laughed at my interest in microprocessors, wondering why I was interested in toys. He told me to talk to him when I was ready to make some money...

_________________
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. ...Jan van de Snepscheut

There's still a lot of COBOL about running on mainframes, especially in retail banks - Your bank account is probably managed by some 1960's COBOL applications. One of the popular investment management trading/operations systems I had to interface with in the early 2000's is written in it.

It turns out COBOL is quite portable. Implementations like Micro Focus COBOL have compiled into virtual machine code for many decades, longer than Java.

_________________
Andrew Jacobs
6502 & PIC Stuff - http://www.obelisk.me.uk/
Cross-Platform 6502/65C02/65816 Macro Assembler - http://www.obelisk.me.uk/dev65/
Open Source Projects - https://github.com/andrew-jacobs

Cobol has indeed been very important for business applications, since it was developed for simple efficient currency number crunching and database transactions.

And it is still is in wide use, many legacy applications are written in it.
One can nowadays still make a good living as a Cobol programmer.

From http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh060109-story03.html
The survey found that the average person uses COBOL at least 13 times per day, in the form of cell phone calls, retail transactions, and commuting on trains and subways. (The survey was conducted online in early May, involved 2,397 U.S. adults, and had an error rate of 2 percent.) That means the average American has about 90 interactions with COBOL-based applications per week, or nearly 4,000 per year. People run into COBOL so often because of its sheer footprint--more than 200 billion lines of COBOL in operation around the world, powering more than 30 billion transactions every day, at most of the world's biggest corporations.

The syntax is quite peculiar and uses much longwinding words. The compiler will ofcourse take care of that and can output efficient code.

Variations of the Cobol language are also still in use. I have seen ABAP, the programming language of SAP/R3. And there is an enormous amount of code still being developed in ABAP!

I have personally always avoided business programming, no Cobol nor databases for me. But I also avoided languages such as C and C++, the confusion of compact code, obscure operators and pointers give me a headache. I do like Wirth structured language such as Pascal and Modula and the small Oberon. Pity the Wirth family of languages did not make it. Its now PHP, JavaScript, Python (not bad), Ruby on Rails and C#, C++ etc what is driving the mainstream apps.

Nothing is as bad though as assembler and surprise!, I do like that if well written, with good structured algorithma and well commented. Its alas just as easy to write unreadable spaghetti code in assembler.

Hans

_________________
x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

Does anyone know how to start the Abacus COBOL 64 program? I can't get it running.

It is never a perk when the cost of making code easier for managers to understand is to make it harder for the developers to understand.

And does it even make it easier to understand? There's a reason even grade-schoolers now use funny symbols and whatnot instead of "plain English" (or, at the time, "plain Arabic") to express algebraic equations. See if you can figure out what equation this is:


(That is a real actual equation from a real actual book; as David Barry says, "I am not making this up.")

Show that to someone next time they ask to use a programming language that uses "plain English"!

_________________
Curt J. Sampson - github.com/0cjs

Yeah, I'll stick to algebra, thanks. My attempted translation of those doesn't come out to anything sensible.