Fake customer program timeline

I’m bringing this up, because below, I talked about the population issue. And this program has become incredibly useful to me, in generating “real looking” test data. In either normal random record length, data terminated with a line feed, on Linux… or fixed length records, common on IBM mainframes. There was a time I would …

Fake customer generator program Modification

A few months ago or maybe several years ago I generated some fake customer data, using a Python program I wrote. Then I wrote a program (actually a GnuCOBOL control break program) to print totals by state and realized the number of customers between states were about the same. So Wyoming had approx the same …

Build GnuCOBOL 3.2

Among other changes, I saw an EBCDIC conversion compile switch, which piqued my interest.Latest version 3.2, manual build to replace 3.1.2 package install My old install notes helped alot. One error at the beginning was solved simply by removing spaces in a subdirectory. Switching from apt-get to apt solved some problems. It appears that mpir, …

GnuCOBOL other EBCDIC/ASCII considerations

Take a deeper look at this. I used INSPECT for my conversion, should also look into TRANSFORM. According to what I’ve read about TRANSFORM… This statement exists within GnuCOBOL to provide compatibility with COBOL programs written to pre-1985 standards. The TRANSFORM statement was made obsolete in the 1985 standard of COBOL, having been replaced by …

New project idea… already done

It’s 4AM and I can’t sleep. I was watching a YouTube video about COBOL on the Commodore 128. And it got me thinking about GnuCOBOL. I started looking at some of my old GnuCOBOL programs. And I realized I never wrote one to read EBCDIC data. You know hypothetically, an IBM shop sends me file …