Cob2C: Cobol to C Converter Software

Despite the hype about many modern languages, even today COBOL remains a widely used language. Billions of lines of code exist under all platforms in COBOL. However, getting the manpower to maintain these program is turning out to be a difficult proposition, as the younger generation of programmers are not attracted towards it.

There is simultaneously the need to convert these programs to use GUI, so that any computer literate person can use them without special training.

One way of fully utilising these proven programs is to convert them into 'C' programs, keeping the same logic. 'C' is available on even more number of platforms and the 'C' compilers improve with every passing year.

Such a conversion to 'C' solves the programmer availability problems, paves the way to move these programs to many platforms and opens up the possibility of using the modern Object Oriented techniques.

Dataflow's very unique product 'Cobol-to-C' handles the conversion of ANSI COBOL to ANSI C. It translates complete COBOL programs including multilevel record descriptions to equivalent C programs.

These C programs may then be compiled using any C or C++ compiler. As all types of databases (such as ODBC, SQL and even proprietory ones) can be easily accessed through C, porting to modern networked systems is simplified.

Utilising the GUI development tools of commercial 'C' based environments, such as MFC under Windows and XWINDOWS under UNIX, these programs can have the most modern user interfaces.

Our converter was initially developed to handle COBOL code generated by the Texas Instruments Workbench, so it has special features to handle such code. However, these features are also useful during the conversion of hand-written COBOL code or COBOL code which was generated using some other case tool.

The Cobol-to-C converter is a PC based program. It runs very fast and converts very big COBOL programs to their C equivalents in only a few seconds. Several aspects of the conversion are controllable simply by altering an ini file provided.