Micro Focus Plc, gearing up to get its shares traded on Wall Street in American Depository Receipt form – it is understood that the company does not plan to raise any new money – plays a star role on the new IBM RS/6000 Unix machines: IBM’s AIX VS Cobol Compiler/6000 and AIX VS Cobol Run Time Environment/6000 are based on the Micro Focus VS Cobol environment and are source-code compatible with AIX/RT VS Cobol, AIX PS/2 VS Cobol, and IBM Cobol/2 for the PS/2, all of which are from Micro Focus; the new compiler, available in the second quarter, generates both intermediate interpreted code for portability and native machine code for where highest performance is required, and the run-time version executes both; it also conforms to the Systems Application Architecture Common Programming Interface, which means that existing SAA-conformant Cobol applications can be transferred to the Unix machines with little or no modification; it is also designed to facilitate migration of programs written for IBM 370-type mainframes in OS/VS Cobol and in VS Cobol II.
