Micro Focus Plc has unveiled the Micro Focus Software Development Kit for the 32-bit IBM Corp OS/2 and Microsoft Corp Windows NT operating systems. The kit provides an environment for creating 32-bit Cobol applications and migrating existing 16-bit applications to a 32-bit execution environment. It comes with 32-bit tools taken from the Cobol Workbench range, including Cobol compiler, Animator graphical code debugger and a large part of the Operating System Extensions execution environment. It is claimed to open the door to cross-system development on over 500 systems. It removes restrictions associated with 16-bit architecture such as 64Kb system limits and the need for segment crossing code, and provides support for mixed language applications – Cobol modules can communicate directly with modules written in C, Pascal, PL/I, assembler and other languages, and routines such as Presentation Manager and WIN32 can be called directly from Cobol. It can produce Micro Focus intermediate code, native code and standard object code files with portability provided at the source and object levels using intermediate object code. Native code is portable across operating systems based on 32-bit Intel iAPX-86 architecture including OS/2 2.X, Windows NT and Santa Cruz Operation Inc Unix. It’s out this month; no prices.
