Interactive COBOL

Interactive COBOL (ICOBOL) is a general-purpose COBOL based on ANSI-74 COBOL with many ANSI-85 features and useful extensions. It is available for today's  major open-system operating system platforms.

A more thorough description of the product structure can be found  on the Runtime,  Development, and Optional Modules pages, but here are some highlights of the newest features found in ICOBOL 4, and some of the very helpful features that were added in ICOBOL 3. For complete details, visit the Download page to get the latest readme files,  the Documentation page to get complete product documentation, and the ICOBOL 3 History page for more detail on the ICOBOL 3 releases.

ICOBOL 4.0x

• Dual-mode (character/GUI) ThinClient with automatic reconnection capabilities
• Enhanced logging and mirroring facilities for data protection and integrity
• Updated networking infrastructure for our client-server products
• Helper functions for reading and writing .csv format files

ICOBOL 3 (cumulative)

• The ability to send an e-mail message directly from an ICOBOL program.
• A new command-line utility (also callable from an ICOBOL program) that allows you to send a URL request to a server and get the response back. It can be used for tasks as simple as downloading a web page or as complex as performing an XML-based transaction.
• Integrated SQL (ISQL) support was added to the runtime and compiler.  ISQL provides a simple way of using popular relational databases directly from within COBOL programs in a nearly seamless fashion. 
• New literal types include: DATE, TIME, TIMESTAMP, and INTERVAL.
• New data types include: CHARACTER, CHARACTER VARYING, DATE,  INDICATOR, INTEGER, INTERVAL, NUMERIC, SMALLINT, TIME, and TIMESTAMP.
• New statements include: COMMIT, CONNECT, DEALLOCATE, DISCONNECT, EXECUTE, EXECUTE IMMEDIATE, FETCH, GET DIAGNOSTICS, PREPARE, ROLLBACK, and SET CONNECTION. At runtime, ISQL makes use of standard ODBC calls to access any data manager available to ODBC.
  NOTE: Use of these new statements requires an additional runtime license called an ICSQL Runtime License.
• Integrated Development Environment (Windows)
• The ICSORT utility now has a scripting capability. This feature provides logic statements to control record selection, formatting statements to select fields and compose output records, and conversion statements to convert data and perform character set and string translations.
• The printer-pass-thru capabilities of the GUI runtime (icrunw) and thin-client (icrunrc) were enhanced significantly.
• The font selection capabilities of the GUI runtimes was enhanced to provide Bold versions of fonts. This can result in an easier-to-read font for some applications.
• The GUI runtime fully supports the terminal-style attributes of bold, underline, reverse-video, and blink (as well as colors). Previously some of the attributes were mapped to color combinations.
• Enhanced ICISAM utilities
• Enhanced telnet server detection.
• Improved ICISAM performance.
• Watch can now be used to watch a terminal with more lines and columns than the watcher's  terminal.
• Support for up to 2048 consoles, printer queues, printer devices, and serial devices, and up to 1024 MB of buffer space.
• Support for compressed mode in Windows and with appropriate terminals

ICOBOL was designed with these key factors in mind:

• Application portability
  ICOBOL applications are portable across all supported operating system and hardware platforms. This portability extends to the program files that comprise the application, the data files, and even most system management functions and operating procedures.
  
  
• Scalability
  Because of many years of performance tuning and various networking solutions, the ICOBOL products are noted for their scalability. That means you can configure an appropriate solution based on your specific application, budget, and performance needs, and easily scale up or down to another environment if those factors change in the future.
  
  
• Multi-user support
  Features such as record locking and exclusive file access that are an afterthought in some systems are at the heart of ICOBOL. In developing ICOBOL, we have always remained sensitive to multi-user performance issues, such as efficient file access and terminal I/O.
  
  
• Pricing consistent with your solution needs
  The ICOBOL product is divided into runtime and development components with a number of optional modules. This allows you tailor a system with just the components you need for a cost-effective solution. Our pricing is sensitive to your needs and consistent with the scale of your solution.