I had recently typed my MVT COBOL Report Writer source into a Linux file I intended to compile with gnuCOBOL when that feature becomes available. Currently it’s optionally available. At the time, I thought…why am I spending so much time manually typing this in and visually trying to line things up. I’m glad I did because I’m rapidly getting comfortable working with Hercules and MVS, So I used that source, after cleaning up syntax for a MVS test along with some test data I generated. One line I mistyped was ‘TYPE DE LINE NUMBER IS PLUS 1.’ which doesn’t make sense while quickly typing in something which at this current stage is very foreign to me, so my eyes saw ‘TYPE OF LINE NUMBER IS PLUS 1.’ which the compiler flagged as wrong…but at least made some sense to my subconscious. Surprisingly COBOL syntax still is fairly familiar to me, but the Report Writer feature is something I used in school…once…and never again. This is my code from school, but today I couldn’t tell you how it works. Anywho the MVS COBOL compiler told me the errors of my ways. And I was able to successfully test it on MVS. One thing to point out is I use my Hercules mainframe like a common PC. Fixing one thing and rerunning over and over until it works. I never would have done that in school days. Because if you were lucky you might be able to get results once an hour. So you would patiently fix as many things as possible before each rerun.