From the course: COBOL Essential Training

Set up a COBOL environment - COBOL Tutorial

From the course: COBOL Essential Training

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Set up a COBOL environment

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- In order to write, compile and execute code in COBOL, in the past, you needed a very large computer. I mean large, as big as a room in your house also called a mainframe computer, such as an IBM 360. Fun fact, that was the first type of computer that I worked on way back in 1984. The good news for us is that there are now emulators that can help simulate these actions on a personal computer. This will make our life a lot easier. I want to review the software requirements for following along with this course. You are welcome to use other products, but I've chosen to use a combination of a Windows subsystem for Linux, WSL, which you see here, Debian, which will be used to create the actual Linux installation, GnuCOBOL, which is formerly OpenCOBOL. This will be used for the compiler and finally Visual Studio. I'm going to use visual studio as my code editor. By choosing WSL with Debian for setting up my Linux environment, it makes it much easier to install the GnuCOBOL using the Linux install commands without having to download and install GnuCOBOL separately. In addition, one of the features of VS code is the ability to integrate directly with the WSL environment, so I can edit my code and access the compiler from within the VS code, IDE. I do want to point out that all of these tools are open source and available as free downloads. This course is designed to teach programming in COBOL, so I will not be exploring the features and uses of WSL in Linux. So to learn more about WSL in Linux, I suggest you check out these two courses on LinkedIn Learning by Scott Simpson.

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