COBOL Tutorial Series: A calculation program - Session 2

Hello. I'm Duke

In the previous article, I showed you how to program and compile COBOL applications on Windows 11 without a mainframe computer through WSL (Debian) and Visual Studio Code.

Now, I will guide you how to write a very simple calculation program, allowing you to calculate the sum of 2 numbers entered from the keyboard.

First, create the calculate.cbi file

 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. PROGRAM-ID. SimpleAddition. DATA DIVISION. WORKING-STORAGE SECTION. 01 Number1 PIC 9(4). 01 Number2 PIC 9(4). 01 Result PIC 9(4). PROCEDURE DIVISION. Main-Process. DISPLAY "Enter first number (0-9999): " ACCEPT Number1 DISPLAY "Enter second number (0-9999): " ACCEPT Number2 COMPUTE Result = Number1 + Number2 DISPLAY "The sum of " Number1 " and " Number2 " is " Result STOP RUN. 

Then, run the following commands:

cobc -x calculate.cbl ./calculate 

and here is the result

Some notes:

PIC 9(4) means:

• 9: indicates that the variable will contain digits (0-9).
• (4): specifies that the variable can contain up to 4 digits.

Repository here