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