Happy New Year!

000010 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
000020 PROGRAM-ID. NEWYEAR2011.
000040 AUTHOR. GERT.
000050
000100 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
000200 CONFIGURATION SECTION.
000210 SOURCE-COMPUTER. GERT-LAPTOP.
000230
000300 DATA DIVISION.
000310 WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
000320 01 TEKST1 PIC X(80)
000330     VALUE "WE WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS,".
000340 01 TEKST2 PIC X(80)
000350     VALUE "AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!".
000410 01  IX  PIC S9(5) COMP-3.
000420
000500 PROCEDURE DIVISION.
000710    PERFORM VARYING IX FROM 1 TO 3
000720        DISPLAY TEKST1
000730    END-PERFORM.
000740    DISPLAY TEKST2.
000760    STOP RUN.

It has been some time ago I wrote COBOL for a living, please forgive me if it doesn't compile ;-)
(thanks to Jan Frut for the inspiration for the program above).

Old and New technology

This new year we plan to bring our program WatchDirectory to the current technology level. No, don't worry, WatchDirectory isn't written in COBOL ;-) It is written with Microsoft C++, but a rather old version of their compiler.

You can expect several new WatchDirectory releases this year where we will have spent a lot of time on improving our toolset (compiler and other tools). We will obviously also implement nice new features and plugins, but the new tools will at first be quite invisible for you.

One thing that will be possible with those new compiler/tools is to create a 64bit version of WatchDirectory. The current (32bit) version runs fine on Windows 64, but to keep up with all future Windows improvements we need a 64bit version.

And a Batch script

The COBOL program as a batch script ;-)

SET GREET1=We wish you a merry Christmas,
SET GREET2=And a Happy New Year!

Call :DoGreet1
ECHO %GREET2%
GOTO :EOF

:DoGreet1
SET COUNT=0
:DoGreet1_Again
SET /A COUNT=COUNT + 1
IF %COUNT% GTR 3 GOTO :EOF
ECHO %GREET1%
GOTO :DoGreet1_Again