In what looks like bad news for Micro Focus Plc, Newtonabbey, Northern Ireland-based Unibol Ltd, subsidiary of UniComp Inc, Marietta, Georgia has launched a Cobol compiler for Unibol 36, the rehosting environment designed to enable developers move System 36 applications into Unix environments. Until now, the 15% of the 180,000 System 36 sites worldwide whose applications are Cobol-based have had to convert IBM Cobol to Micro Focus Plc Cobol if they’ve wanted to use Unibol 36 to migrate to Unix. Joint managing director of the company, Dr Barry Hagan, said this had not been popular with customers, who viewed Micro Focus’s Cobol as just another dialect their developers would have to learn. Hence the development of the native compiler, so that the company could target System 36 users that hadn’t developed their applications in RPG II. The product will also be used as the basis of a Cobol compiler for Unibol 400, the migration kit for AS/400 to Unix. This Cobol is expected by the end of the year. UnibolCobol/36 costs รบ2,500 as a one-off price.
