This would be useful, the idea being that "I've got a copylib member, I've got a data file, I just want to process it in Perl". I have done this quite a bit in the past, but always make up my own data storage, parsing code, etc. Q1: maybe IO::COBOL ??? Q2: Not sure if I agree with your assumptions, here. My own take on such a module would be the ability to do something like

IO::COBOL::ReadData($FILEHANDL, $COBOLRecord);
IO::COBOL::WriteData($OUTFILEHANDL, $COBOLRecord);
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Q3: Omygod, I'm not ready for Perl6 Other: Why not just add subscripts to the (target) data variables for an OCCURS statement? 88 levels are just Static symbols. I would assume that all data has already been translated to ASCII encoding in order to use this. Are you working on something? I can work on it if you don't have anything yet (although I've never written a CPAN module before). ... HH