PL/I was developed by IBM as part of the development of System/360 in the mid-1960s. It received significant use in business data processing, and also for more general programming use throughout the 1970s. Today there are still many applications relying on PL/I.

Nowadays, due to the dwindling number of experienced PL/I language programmers, businesses are looking for ways to transition away from the use of the PL/I language, and yet retain the tremendous investment they have made in their PL/I code base. 

The BluePhoenix migration solution PL/I to COBOL is a comprehensive, automated, and time-efficient solution that migrates PL/I programs to functionally equivalent COBOL programs.

Business Benefits

• Reduces maintenance costs
• Makes application enhancement easier
• Provides cost-effective migration
• Eliminates the IT resources problem
• Enables using the existing and proven logic and investment, and modifying the application according to business needs
• Uses proven, automated tools, thereby mitigating many of the project risks

BluePhoenix’s PL/I migration solution maps each PL/I instruction to a corresponding fragment of COBOL code. Registers, flags, and storage are mapped to COBOL variables that together simulate the original architecture.

The functionality of the original PL/I program is completely preserved during the migration.