Back to the future

By Alun Williams

Posted on 20 Aug 2002 at 17:22

.Net may conjure up futuristic images of Web services, but COBOL calls up a more mainframe way of computing. The two now come together with Fujitsu's NetCOBOL.

Fujitsu has announced a new version of its NetCOBOL programming language (which was previously known as Fujitsu COBOL). NetCOBOL for .Net - as the name suggests - is an implementation of the old data processing language for Microsoft's .Net platform.

It includes a compiler for the .Net Framework common language runtime engine, support for ASP.Net and XML Web services, and integration with the Visual Studio .NET development environment. The release is dubbed Version 1a, as the very first version of the product was released in April.

'NetCOBOL is the only non-Microsoft language that has implemented support for the Web Forms and Windows Forms designers,' said Ron Langer, director of languages for Fujitsu Software Corporation. 'This gives us the advantage of being able to leverage all the Microsoft tools and make them available to COBOL programmers.'

Such an implementation - mixing old and new technologies - is not as outlandish as may first seem. COBOL is a programming language that refuses to die - a vast number of tried and trusted legacy systems are written in COBOL - and .Net was always intended to work with existing systems wherever possible. The range of languages capable of working with the .Net framework includes Fortran and Eiffel as well as the likes of Visual Basic and C++.

You can read more about NetCOBOL for .Net - and download a trial version - on the Fujitsu Web site.

Programming languages
Microsoft's .Net