IBM Mainframe Forum

Hi,

We are planning to convert existing assembler program to COBOL.Please help me if any third party tool is available or any rexx program to perform this task.

A quick Google search found a few tools and consulting firms, took me about .001 second to find
convert existing assembler program to COBOL.

Please help me if any third party tool is available or any rexx program to perform this task

what happened when You searched for them Yourself ?
googling for example with assembler to cobol conversion tools

but... just wiser to forget about it, assembler has too many quirks to make it automagically translatable to any other language

there are some non free products who claim to do it, but ... ... ...
how much preventive cleanup and tagging of assembler code ? ? ?
the converted code will be pretty often unreadable/unmanageable

more cost effective to plan for a rewrite based on the business logic.

Thank you

This is a question from several months ago, but not so old that I should probably feel too embarrassed to be replying. In my own experience converting ALC to COBOL, I generally find that I need to rethink how the program works. That does not tend to lend itself to automatic conversion. You can, however, do a lot with the newer COBOL, a little clever thinking, and a lot of care. In particular, you can do some very useful tricks using LINKAGE areas and assigning pointers, although one should always be careful about being too clever.

Well,
this is interesting. Though, I totally, agree that “assembler has too many quirks to make it automatically translatable to any other language”
I am well aware, that there are probably a number of tools which claim to convert assembler into Cobol. Although, I had not personally used any of these tools, I can’t see the translation from Assembler into Cobol as single iterative process.

As with my experience, of needing new Cobol programs rewritten from existing assembler code, I though about how tedious of the task of doing it by hand. So, I pondered over ways of reducing the manual labor involved. Overtime, after upon recognizing some common patterns of how the code was written, as a result, I had written a utility that reads a particular output file from the assembler which then build partial Cobol programs based upon a common coding style. I had gotten as far as deciphering assembly language defined storage into Cobol’s working storage, and creating linkage parameters (to some degree) based upon the usage of register 1. But in all fairness, upon all the work put into this utility, it only reduced my efforts by a third of the time than if I had written the code totally by hand. Inclusion, I believe, the translation of assembler into Cobol is a multiple iterative process, which involves research, planning, and design.