COBOL ReSource is a Wang VS COBOL development and production environment for Unix. A product of Getronics (formerly Wang Laboratories, Inc.), COBOL ReSource was first released in 1993 as a tool to replatform and run Wang VS COBOL applications in Unix. It was updated and rereleased in 1995 and its maintenance and ongoing development outsourced to SRDI in the late 1990s.
Unique Wang COBOL dialect ported to Unix
Wang dialects of COBOL-74 and COBOL-85 have important places in the evolution of COBOL. Wang was among the first, if not the first, to integrate COBOL into environments built from the ground up to be interactive as well as batch. Wang also had a principal role in the COBOL standards bodies until the early 1990s. Wang extensions to COBOL involving record locking scope, rollback and rollforward recovery implemented at the file system level allowing transaction processing, and full interactive workstation screen I/O have often made it difficult to port Wang COBOL applications to other systems.
Entire VS look and feel in Unix
On the surface COBOL ReSource appeals to VS users and software developers because it is faithful to the VS look and feel with 32 PFKeys, foreground suspension via Help, VS Field Attribute Characters, underlining, etc. Under the covers, however, are more significant compatibility features such as VS-style argument passing and return by reference between disjoint processes, and full PUTPARM/GETPARM functionality.
VS file system ported to Unix
Wang's premium XDMS file system was ported to Unix to serve as the file system for COBOL ReSource. Called PDMS, it has a track record of supporting shared access to multiple indexed files for user populations as large as 1,000.