Re: [GNU-COBOL] New to COBOL

[Fred Mobach <fred@mobach.nl>]

"David L. Nicol" wrote:

> Davyd Ondrejko wrote:
>
> > Numeric-edited fields and alphanumeric-edited fields would be
> > particularly enjoyable.  Floating or fixed insertion symbols (+, - or
> > $), zero suppression with blank or asterisk replacement, CR and/or DB
> > symbols, BLANK WHEN ZERO, and so forth.
>
> These would be a property of the instance of the display method, rather
> than the data, I think (coming to this with no experience of COBOL
> whatsoever.)

In practice this is indeed editing at the time the field is filled with data
(coming to this with 29 years experience of Cobol).


> What kinds of file systems or other persistence abstractions exist in
> the general COBOL environment?  Does COBOL give low-level calls to
> things
> like "read a block of records from tape drive 2" or what?  Do you have
> to mount the tape with a name and then read the records from the device
> with the name?

A long time ago I started with some documentation in this mailinglist on this
topic and asked if anybody was interested. As nobody was I stopped submissions.
If anyone is interested now I'll restart those submissions (there is already a
lack of social life :-) ).

To answer your question : no, Cobol gives you the possibility to read a _record_
of a tape, but not a block. Mounting of a tape with or without a name depends on
the LABEL IS clause. In many cases tape files are labeled. As you know you can
put many files on one tape, one file on many tapes and many files on many tapes.
Working without labels is a mess then :-).

Note that Cobol programs assume they're started after a check for the necessary
resources. It's not common practice to test if problems arise after opening a
file.


> How do people get into COBOL programming?  It's never offered in schools

Well, at the time I started with computer programming there were no schools who
offered any education on computers, no Cobol, no Fortran, no Algol, no RPG, no
Assemblers, no databases (they didn't even exist) and so on. Self-education is
possible, really :-). But if you want to learn Cobol, you can accept my help !

Regards,

Fred



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