Used Visual Studio Code to create a program (testinitial) from the gnucobol manual and saved to a directory. Then in TERMINAL, ran cobs testinitial.cbl and it said:
xcode-select: note: No developer tools were found, requesting install.
If developer tools are located at a non-default location on disk, use sudo xcode-select --switch path/to/Xcode.app to specify the Xcode that you wish to use for command line developer tools, and cancel the installation dialog.
See man xcode-select for more details.
And placed an icon for installation of developer tools which I clicked on and it duly installed.
Again I typed cobs testinitial.cbl and received:
ld: warning: -undefined suppress is deprecated
ld: warning: -undefined suppress is deprecated
And a file testinitial.dylib was created. How to execute as click-execute produces garbage?
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
cobc (GnuCOBOL) 3.2.0
Copyright (C) 2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Written by Keisuke Nishida, Roger While, Ron Norman, Simon Sobisch, Edward Hart
Built Sep 21 2024 02:54:20
Packaged Jul 28 2023 17:02:56 UTC
C version "Apple LLVM 16.0.0 (clang-1600.0.26.6)"
cobc -x testinitial.cbl produced a file without an extension. A single click shows a black square with "exec" in green. - how to execute?
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
This means from a terminal program that you loaded, and in the folder
containing the program source just do :
cobc -x progname.cbl (or other extension used.
progname followed by enter
Oh, another option is cobc -xj progname.cbl
This will compile the proram and then run it.
On 05/09/2025 13:03, Simon Sobisch wrote:
Again - How did you install it?
Note: You may want to try opening the executable from the terminal and
see what happens then.
Thank you all for your help, I'm starting to get the hang of it. Just to fill you in, I'm a retired person who once did a lot of Cobol programming (amongst other languages) but wanted to see where the language is at now and so, I'm experimenting and in order to do that, I need to understand the flow from source to execution.
cobc -xj progname.cbl compiled and executed the program - thank you.
As to how I installed the compiler, strange as it may seem, I'm not sure but I didn't use HOMEBREW.
Anyway, hopefully I'm underway and thanks.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Glad it works for you. Yes, Like you I am well retired (78 years) and
starting in IT on a IBM 1401 and 7094 around 1963 moving on with 360,
370's and up as well as ICL 1900's 29 & 39 series with the odd
smattering of Univac, Burroughs, Honeywell to name but a few in the many
years of also being a freelance contractor from 1987 or so with in my
spare time upgrading my pilots license PPL to a commercial, Instructor,
IR etc and adding a few thousand hours with both singles and twin etc,
20kG and up.
The flying for fun but it did not pay well so IT was the keeping the
light on profession.
Still involved in Cobol programming as a have few applications and a
accounting suite all now placed on sourceforge as open source.
If nothing else to ensure the time spend and code does not go to waste
although not at all sure how many users there who have downloaded and
using them.
I have converted the lot over to GnuCobol from Microsoft etc, over 20+
years ago when the GC version was pre v1.0 but all running under
Linux.since discontinuing OS/2 when IBM gave it up.
Vincent
On 06/09/2025 06:03, Alan Honeyman wrote:
Thank you all for your help, I'm starting to get the hang of it. Just
to fill you in, I'm a retired person who once did a lot of Cobol
programming (amongst other languages) but wanted to see where the
language is at now and so, I'm experimenting and in order to do that,
I need to understand the flow from source to execution.
cobc -xj progname.cbl compiled and executed the program - thank you.
As to how I installed the compiler, strange as it may seem, I'm not
sure but I didn't use HOMEBREW.
I'm a year older than you and my initial computer experience was as an operator at Shell on their LEO machines then my programming training and experience was on an ICT1004 (actually Univac) plugboard "computer" (smart tabulator?). Then onto ICL1901A, 1902A, Honeywell 316 and HP3000. At HP for 25 years.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
I'm a year older than you and my initial computer experience was as an
operator at Shell on their LEO machines then my programming training
and experience was on an ICT1004 (actually Univac) plugboard
"computer" (smart tabulator?). Then onto ICL1901A, 1902A, Honeywell
316 and HP3000. At HP for 25 years.
Yes remember those - I did some work on the LEO 3 (the fore runner of
the first programmable computer for business in the 50's and this one
was at ICL (ICT) building at Whiteley's (no may be wrong, forgot the
exact name) in Queensway, London sitting in the basement which I can
only say was err, interesting :)
The UNIVAC 1004 hmm, no think it was a 1104, I recall was with Wimpeys
(the builders) who had it in use as the front end to a larger system
which I cannot remember at this moment, because it had a card reader and
punch and a printer. Could have been a Burroughs or a CDC.
Don't remember how that was programmed, so yes, could have been a
glorified URE system. [ Somewhere there was also Amdahl, RS6000 but not listed against company. ]
This was at the time they also had URE (unit record equipment) that I
recall programming by using long cables/wires to connect to two points
on a largish plug board - lots of wires but not anywhere as bad as the
back plane of a mainframe that had many thousands of them.
HP's seem to recall (OK I looked at my old CV), HP3000 & 9000 but no
idea where, as just shown on the kit list.
ICT 1901, 2, 4 (and others) - according to the cv again (memory is not
so good) using COBOL, TABN, PLAN, GIN, BASIC: Most commercial
applications under George 1 - 4 and I have a sim that runs George 2 and
may be 3 along with the system s/w which runs on my Linux system.
The IBM 1401 was my first using Autocode (assembler) and Cobol and
Fortran (7094) that sat in the next room in front of large windows that
the 16 tape drive could be unloaded all at the same time by a button on
the console desk which amused the people walking home from the Friday,
Saturday night out in the west end etc. I was acting as an operator then
- around 1963 on night shifts (paid a lot more) before moving to be a
programmer and still did oper shifts - for the money as a weekend shift
of 2 x 12 hour shifts paid twice the amount of working the weekday
period. Happy days as rarely got the chance to spend any money !
To give you an idea of the sites I worked at, here is a list from the
same doc showing some there the bottom is the oldest :
· Holiday Fellowship. D.P. Manager: Responsible for all personnel in
department; standards for
programming and operations; all design, programming and daily
operations of an ICL 2900 on a
range of applications including Hotel Reservations, Billing,
General accounts etc.
· International Computers Ltd (T&SS, S&TS). Chief Programmer & Project
Leader. Transition
from 1900 to 2900 i.e.: Various applications in COBOL using IDMS,
TP. G2 & 3 to VME SCL,
S3, Algol68R & SFL. Sizing projects for 2900. Technical support.
· Fawcett, Barbados: System design & redesign, programming conversion of
IBM 1401 in
Autocode and machine code to ICL 1900 COBOL.
· Plessey, Ilford, Swindon, Weybridge: Programming various suites,
George 3 & 4 macro writing &
general advisor/support on ICL 1900 problems.
· Triplex, St. Helens: Programming suite of programs in COBOL, TABN and
supervising three
other programmers.
· Pilkington Bros., St. Helens: Programming & conversion of ICL 1900,
ICL 1900 COBOL to IBM
370/158 ANSI COBOL IBM 370/158 ANSI COBOL.
· British Gas: writing program specifications, consultant George 3 &
utils 1900 & sys 4.
· SPL, London: Coding and testing under test harness using George 3 & 4.
· CEIR, London: Programming commercial applications for various
customers mainly using
COBOL and assembler on Burroughs, CDC, Univac, Honeywell, ICL and IBM.
· Computer Automated Systems: Senior Programmer/Analyst. Systems design
& programming of
payroll systems for clients using IBM 370 in COBOL, Assembler.
· Smith & Sons. Senior Programmer/Project Leader: Stock Control, Retail
subscriptions. Liaison
with ICL for software support on ICL1900 and 29/39 systems..
· BOC & Winpey. Senior Programmer, Stock control for component parts.
IBM 360/40. Production
planning, Stock , Payroll, Sales & Costs Ledgers ICL 1904E in
Cobol/Plan.
· Various, Part time and full time. Operator IBM 1401 & 7094 and
programmer for 1401 machine
code, Assembler (autocode), Cobol and programming unit record equipment.
I still have books and some manuals for the 1401 (Cobol, all 50 pages
of it), Autocode, Fortran etc.
I do some times run up using Hercules MVS 3.8J, OS390 and even zOS on it
as the later two was from clients to so work remotely as some projects
could be damaging the a m/f system. All old versions though as did not
need 'the' latest that the m/f was running providing the Cobol compiler
was the same etc.
Now if I load any up it is a trip down memory lane :)
Am I correct that you are UK based? I am in Hatfield, Herts these days.
Used Visual Studio Code to create a program (testinitial) from the gnucobol manual and saved to a directory. Then in TERMINAL, ran cobs testinitial.cbl and it said:
xcode-select: note: No developer tools were found, requesting install.
If developer tools are located at a non-default location on disk, use
sudo xcode-select --switch path/to/Xcode.appto specify the Xcode that you wish to use for command line developer tools, and cancel the installation dialog.See
man xcode-selectfor more details.And placed an icon for installation of developer tools which I clicked on and it duly installed.
Again I typed cobs testinitial.cbl and received:
ld: warning: -undefined suppress is deprecated
ld: warning: -undefined suppress is deprecated
And a file testinitial.dylib was created. How to execute as click-execute produces garbage?
How did you install GnuCOBOL and what does
cobc -Vsay?That is the reason for the ld warning (which would totally trip me, but is no problem).
For an executable, you want to use
cobc -x testinitial.cbl.cobc (GnuCOBOL) 3.2.0
Copyright (C) 2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Written by Keisuke Nishida, Roger While, Ron Norman, Simon Sobisch, Edward Hart
Built Sep 21 2024 02:54:20
Packaged Jul 28 2023 17:02:56 UTC
C version "Apple LLVM 16.0.0 (clang-1600.0.26.6)"
cobc -x testinitial.cbl produced a file without an extension. A single click shows a black square with "exec" in green. - how to execute?
Again - How did you install it?
Note: You may want to try opening the executable from the terminal and see what happens then.
This means from a terminal program that you loaded, and in the folder
containing the program source just do :
cobc -x progname.cbl (or other extension used.
progname followed by enter
Oh, another option is cobc -xj progname.cbl
This will compile the proram and then run it.
On 05/09/2025 13:03, Simon Sobisch wrote:
Thank you all for your help, I'm starting to get the hang of it. Just to fill you in, I'm a retired person who once did a lot of Cobol programming (amongst other languages) but wanted to see where the language is at now and so, I'm experimenting and in order to do that, I need to understand the flow from source to execution.
cobc -xj progname.cbl compiled and executed the program - thank you.
As to how I installed the compiler, strange as it may seem, I'm not sure but I didn't use HOMEBREW.
Anyway, hopefully I'm underway and thanks.
Glad it works for you. Yes, Like you I am well retired (78 years) and
starting in IT on a IBM 1401 and 7094 around 1963 moving on with 360,
370's and up as well as ICL 1900's 29 & 39 series with the odd
smattering of Univac, Burroughs, Honeywell to name but a few in the many
years of also being a freelance contractor from 1987 or so with in my
spare time upgrading my pilots license PPL to a commercial, Instructor,
IR etc and adding a few thousand hours with both singles and twin etc,
20kG and up.
The flying for fun but it did not pay well so IT was the keeping the
light on profession.
Still involved in Cobol programming as a have few applications and a
accounting suite all now placed on sourceforge as open source.
If nothing else to ensure the time spend and code does not go to waste
although not at all sure how many users there who have downloaded and
using them.
I have converted the lot over to GnuCobol from Microsoft etc, over 20+
years ago when the GC version was pre v1.0 but all running under
Linux.since discontinuing OS/2 when IBM gave it up.
Vincent
On 06/09/2025 06:03, Alan Honeyman wrote:
I'm a year older than you and my initial computer experience was as an operator at Shell on their LEO machines then my programming training and experience was on an ICT1004 (actually Univac) plugboard "computer" (smart tabulator?). Then onto ICL1901A, 1902A, Honeywell 316 and HP3000. At HP for 25 years.
On 07/09/2025 04:34, Alan Honeyman wrote:
The UNIVAC 1004 hmm, no think it was a 1104, I recall was with Wimpeys
(the builders) who had it in use as the front end to a larger system
which I cannot remember at this moment, because it had a card reader and
punch and a printer. Could have been a Burroughs or a CDC.
Don't remember how that was programmed, so yes, could have been a
glorified URE system.
[ Somewhere there was also Amdahl, RS6000 but not listed against company. ]
This was at the time they also had URE (unit record equipment) that I
recall programming by using long cables/wires to connect to two points
on a largish plug board - lots of wires but not anywhere as bad as the
back plane of a mainframe that had many thousands of them.
HP's seem to recall (OK I looked at my old CV), HP3000 & 9000 but no
idea where, as just shown on the kit list.
ICT 1901, 2, 4 (and others) - according to the cv again (memory is not
so good) using COBOL, TABN, PLAN, GIN, BASIC: Most commercial
applications under George 1 - 4 and I have a sim that runs George 2 and
may be 3 along with the system s/w which runs on my Linux system.
The IBM 1401 was my first using Autocode (assembler) and Cobol and
Fortran (7094) that sat in the next room in front of large windows that
the 16 tape drive could be unloaded all at the same time by a button on
the console desk which amused the people walking home from the Friday,
Saturday night out in the west end etc. I was acting as an operator then
- around 1963 on night shifts (paid a lot more) before moving to be a
programmer and still did oper shifts - for the money as a weekend shift
of 2 x 12 hour shifts paid twice the amount of working the weekday
period. Happy days as rarely got the chance to spend any money !
To give you an idea of the sites I worked at, here is a list from the
same doc showing some there the bottom is the oldest :
· Holiday Fellowship. D.P. Manager: Responsible for all personnel in
department; standards for
programming and operations; all design, programming and daily
operations of an ICL 2900 on a
range of applications including Hotel Reservations, Billing,
General accounts etc.
· International Computers Ltd (T&SS, S&TS). Chief Programmer & Project
Leader. Transition
from 1900 to 2900 i.e.: Various applications in COBOL using IDMS,
TP. G2 & 3 to VME SCL,
S3, Algol68R & SFL. Sizing projects for 2900. Technical support.
· Fawcett, Barbados: System design & redesign, programming conversion of
IBM 1401 in
Autocode and machine code to ICL 1900 COBOL.
· Plessey, Ilford, Swindon, Weybridge: Programming various suites,
George 3 & 4 macro writing &
general advisor/support on ICL 1900 problems.
· Triplex, St. Helens: Programming suite of programs in COBOL, TABN and
supervising three
other programmers.
· Pilkington Bros., St. Helens: Programming & conversion of ICL 1900,
ICL 1900 COBOL to IBM
370/158 ANSI COBOL IBM 370/158 ANSI COBOL.
· British Gas: writing program specifications, consultant George 3 &
utils 1900 & sys 4.
· SPL, London: Coding and testing under test harness using George 3 & 4.
· CEIR, London: Programming commercial applications for various
customers mainly using
COBOL and assembler on Burroughs, CDC, Univac, Honeywell, ICL and IBM.
· Computer Automated Systems: Senior Programmer/Analyst. Systems design
& programming of
payroll systems for clients using IBM 370 in COBOL, Assembler.
· Smith & Sons. Senior Programmer/Project Leader: Stock Control, Retail
subscriptions. Liaison
with ICL for software support on ICL1900 and 29/39 systems..
· BOC & Winpey. Senior Programmer, Stock control for component parts.
IBM 360/40. Production
planning, Stock , Payroll, Sales & Costs Ledgers ICL 1904E in
Cobol/Plan.
· Various, Part time and full time. Operator IBM 1401 & 7094 and
programmer for 1401 machine
code, Assembler (autocode), Cobol and programming unit record equipment.
I still have books and some manuals for the 1401 (Cobol, all 50 pages
of it), Autocode, Fortran etc.
I do some times run up using Hercules MVS 3.8J, OS390 and even zOS on it
as the later two was from clients to so work remotely as some projects
could be damaging the a m/f system. All old versions though as did not
need 'the' latest that the m/f was running providing the Cobol compiler
was the same etc.
Now if I load any up it is a trip down memory lane :)
Am I correct that you are UK based? I am in Hatfield, Herts these days.
Vincent
No, it was definitely a 1004 and I'm in Oz, born and always lived in and around Melbourne.
Alan.
Last edit: Alan Honeyman 2025-09-08