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The www.z390.org website has a portable mainframe assembler and emulator 
available for download in open source J2SE java and executable z390.jar 
formats.  It runs on Windows, Linux, and Apple OSX.

This month I wrote 3 very short structured macro assembler programs to extract 
data from two reports, sort the data, and then merge the data into a single 
file for loading into a relational database.  This website has SDK zip with the 
3 MLC programs and also has PDF showing the 8 reported generated from database 
in place of the original reports.  This is offered just as a current example of 
useful open source mainframe code:

 http://www.don-higgins.net/RZDC/Rotary_Zone_District_Country_Downloads.html 

I started to learn J2SE java when I left Micro Focus in 2004.  It is a very 
powerful language once you get to know the working set of library classes such 
as BigInteger and BigDecimal which I used to code emulation for all 9 HFP, BFP, 
and DFP floating point formats.  There is an unfinished version of zcobol 
included along with a lot of working sample COBOL programs.  The zcobol 
compiler which generates MLC source assembler with data labels includes support 
for all 9 floating point types. 

One of the big challenges with open source software is the need for ongoing 
development and support.  When I was director of IT for Florida Power for many 
years, I was perfectly willing to pay IBM, Oracle, and other software vendors 
for software that may not have been perfect but they did offer continued 
development improvements and support.

Don Higgins
[email protected]

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