Question about "converting" from SCO Unix to Linux...
 

I work for large grocery retail company and all of our stores have a server running SCO Open Server 5.*. My boss asked me the other day if I would be interested in doing a little research and coming up with an alternative the hardware/OS that we are using. I asked him if they had ever considered Linux and he said that they did a long time ago. His concern is that all of our in-house applications (written in cobalt) would have to be re-arranged to work within a Linux environment (i.e. structure, libraries, etc...). First of all is this true? Secondly, would this be a nightmare (headache) scenario?
All other comments and questions are welcomed...
Note: I have no knowledge or experience in programming...

§vrdhD~:Pengy:

Hiya

I'm assuming you mean COBOL and not 'cobalt'.

Try here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/cobolforgcc/

Regards

Ooops... yes, I meant COBOL and not Cobalt... I don't know anything about programming but I did know that... call it a typo.

Thanks.

I dont think it would be a headache because linux is built from unix so there is alot of simalarities. Therefore it should be pretty easy todo, as for the COBOL I dont know about that.

First off let me give you the disclaimer. I haven't used COBOL since 1999, except in a couple of isolated instances where I wrote some COBOL programs to extract data from old systems for purposes of data conversion.

I did a quick Google search and discovered that MicroFocus now claims to support Linux with their ACUCOBOL product. Chances are pretty good that they even had a version for SCO Unix, though I've never messed with COBOL in an SCO environment. You might try contacting ACUCORP.

http://www.acucorp.com/markets/linux/

The MicroFocus COBOL compilers I used on Unix were on HP, Sun and IBM gear in the early 90s. They had acceptable performance and decent standards conformance. One advantage was the default configuration compiled the COBOL source to some intermediate language (not native machine code) that was interpreted by a runtime system. Consequently it was pretty portable.

FWIW