Micro Focus Plc yesterday announced plans for the implementation of Object Cobol for Unix, using the same Object Cobol product for Windows and OS/2 announced in May – but it won’t be ready until late next year. Object Cobol for Unix will provide developers with a comprehensive object-oriented development environment and will enable the development of graphical user interface applications using Object Cobol, the company promises. It will enable application developers to migrate existing code to object-orientation incrementally by enabling object and procedural code to co-exist and co-operate. Rather than using a pre-processor, Object Cobol syntax is processed by the Cobol compiler and code is debugged at the source level. The ANSI standard for Object-Oriented Cobol will not be out until 1997, but the Micro Focus product will conform to the most recent snapshot of the emerging standard. The company highlights as a unique feature the Requirements-based Vocabulary it has created, intended to make programs easier both to read and write by enabling the requirements statement to be used directly in programs so that the writer of a new class can specify exactlty how the operations on the class are to be written.
