from seetho

Hello,

It's been quite some time (~25yrs) since I last used COBOL (on a WANG VS100). I just stumbled upon OpenCOBOL recently and felt like picking it up again, especially to build some applications that are heavy on data entry screen. I currently use PERL and LISP so using ncurses is awkward to say the least, and I hate writing GUI apps - call me old fashion.

The first thing I tried was of course the short HELLO.COB sample program. No problems here. The trouble started when I modified the DISPLAY statement to:


The program would compile normally, but when runned it would output nothing. This was on my Ubuntu 10.04/Gnome machine. The program was run under gnome-terminal. Suspecting some terminal problem I tried xterminal instead - nothing again. Then I switch out to a real (TTY) text terminal, and IT WORKS! I get my "Hello world!" displayed on line 5 and column 5 on the screen.

My gnome-terminal session is /dev/pts/0. It would seem that OpenCOBOL (at least on my PC) does not work well with pseudo terminals. If I did:

The output will appear on TTY1.

I tried recompiling OpenCOBOL 1.1 and ncurses 5.9 and still the same result. I even tried it on a freshly installed Debian 6.04 machine and still no go.

Googling did not turn up anything on this so I suspect that I'm the only one having this problem. Am I missing something?

Thanks.