When a COBOL program fails on the Rocket runtime, an engineer or an AI agent needs facts, not guesses. Cobra’s diagnostics read what Rocket’s own compiler and runtime produce and put it in terms of the COBOL: the paragraph, the line, the field and its value.
Record layouts and field facts come from the files the Rocket COBOL compiler writes when it builds your programs. Failure reports name the COBOL paragraph and line from the compiler’s symbol files. Nothing is re-derived by guesswork.
Runtime trace logs and run-unit state are parsed and shown as COBOL fields. Packed decimals appear as numbers. Redefined storage appears under each of its layouts, so a reader sees what the buffer means in every view the program has of it.
Syntax diagnostics, hover, go-to-definition and references are served over the standard editor protocol, with the Micro Focus client extensions, including copybook-to-program binding. An editor configured for Rocket COBOL needs no special handling.
What wrote this field? Where did this value come from? Which program did this dynamic call reach? Each answer is a fact with its source, drawn from the catalogue and from the run itself.
Diagnosing a failure in a thirty-year-old program has usually meant finding the one engineer who can read the storage by eye. These diagnostics put the same evidence in front of anyone on the team, and in front of an AI agent, in the terms the program itself uses. The agent reasons from what the runtime recorded, and its conclusion can be checked against the same record.
Stated limits. These are diagnostics for analysis. They are not a development environment and they do not replace one. They depend on Rocket Visual COBOL: the compiler output and the runtime evidence they read are Rocket’s.
We will run it, read what the runtime recorded, and show you the paragraph, the line and the field behind the failure.
