All
For an example of open source byte COBOL check out the zcobol Portable
Mainframe COBOL compiler and runtime which comes with the z390 Portable
Mainframe Assembler and Emulator which currently runs on Windows, Linux, and
Apple OSX host systems with J2SE 6.0+ runtime installed.
An assembler
The only one that was really an issue was the Neon software. Clearly IBM
took a pretty aggressive move to quash it. Can't remember the name of it
now.
I am guessing that even if you had a perfect cobol-to-java-byte-code
conversion.. you'd skip an upgrade.. maybe two. (Unless your business is
A byte-code COBOL object program might not be as efficient as even the
just-previous generation (4.x) of Enterprise COBOL, given the JVM's
stack-oriented runtime structure and (so I heard somewhere) less-than-efficient
packed-decimal support. Less cost to run on a cheaper processor could be
