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I need help or refernece about this. I am working on MF language called Natural it is used in ADABAS MF. The tools we have right now to program are premitve. I like to know if there is somting similar to this language as an extention in VS CODE for formating, linting etc. I know there is somting for COBOL (older language) but i can't find nothing.

Natual code look like this:

DEFINE DATA LOCAL                                     
01 EMPLOYEES VIEW OF EMPLOYEES                        
  02 SALARY (1)                                       
END-DEFINE                                            
READ EMPLOYEES BY NAME                                
  AT END OF DATA                                      
    DISPLAY                                           
      MIN (EMPLOYEES.SALARY(1)) (EM=ZZZ,ZZZ,ZZ9)        
      AVER(EMPLOYEES.SALARY(1)) (EM=ZZZ,ZZZ,ZZ9)        
      MAX (EMPLOYEES.SALARY(1)) (EM=ZZZ,ZZZ,ZZ9)        
  END-ENDDATA                                         
END-READ                                              
END

Or

* Hello World in NATURAL
WRITE 'Hello World!'
END
yanivz
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  • I can see every single answer on your questions has not gotten your upvote or approval. This makes questions like this one pop up at the homepage of Stackoverflow because the idea is that there is no answer yet. Could you accept (all other questions you have answers for too) if the answer is useful please? This also motivates others to write answers. – Randy Apr 04 '22 at 13:45

2 Answers2

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First of all, it’s been years since I worked with Natural/ADABAS. If you’re working on the mainframe then I believe you are confined to the environment running in the TP monitor (CICS or Com-plete). The natural editor stores the source and compiles the IL into a special table in ADABAS know as the FUSER (a really hope all this is still applicable). The runtime (either batch or online) loads programs from this table and executes them.

I would do some online research and/or call the local sales office and ask to speak to a software systems engineer to get the most recent data.

Dharman
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Larz
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No, there is no Visual Studio extension, but the modern way of manipulating and testing Natural code is called Natural ONE which is an Eclipse based IDE and gives you code formatting (from the green screen program editor there is a STRUCT command for this, btw), interface to VCS and much, much more.

Alex.W
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  • The STRUCT Command (as do all other code formatters) works on the principle RIRO. That is: "Rubbish In : Rubbish Out". It will not miraculously turn a poorly structured program into structured code. It will just make sure all the rubbish its fed looks similar afterwards. Also, as space was once a premium (developing on a 80*24 Screen), the indentation defaults to 2 which is non-standard and insufficient. 4 is a good value as used in for example Java. – Dave The Dane Mar 18 '22 at 06:15