Re: [Fwd: gnubol: Record delimiter clause and parse order]

[Matthew Vanecek <linuxguy@directlink.net>]

Ralph Jones wrote:
> 
> Is spanned, still a file type?  Back in the bad old days, COBOL 74 on 370's you had to use spanned as a sequential file type if a record was larger than 32K.
> 

Never heard of it. ;)  Actually, I've never seen it in our mainframe
code, either, but most of it has been written in the 90's, so...

> For variable length records, does the spec. call for full word padding?  I'm trying to recall, from my mainframe days, and I believe the records were not padded?
> 

I don't recall seeing anything in the spec, but I hadn't really looked
that carefully.  I will double check this afternoon.

> The sequential files has to be platform independent, so you can read the file produced by any compiler on any machine.  The conversion of big little endian data is still up the
> programmer.  This does not include line sequential which is not platform independent.
> 

Well, compiler-independent, anyhow.  Even so, most of the commercial
PC-based compilers advertise support for LINE SEQUENTIAL.  We may as
well include it, even though it's an extension, not a spec, and just
warn the user about that when he compiles a program with the pedantic
option.

> Do you still have the record type 'undefined'?  This was usually used with tape files. The I-O routines delivered a block of data into buffer up to the defined size of the buffer.  I do
> not remember what happened when a block was longer than record size.
> 

Don't think so.  Again, haven't seen it in any of our code, or heard
about it.  Also don't see it in the latest specs, but again, I haven't
read the whole thing.  Will double-check to be sure, though.

Lots of food for thought.  This is really nice,
ciao,
-- 
Matthew Vanecek
Visit my Website at http://mysite.directlink.net/linuxguy
For answers type: perl -e 'print
$i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(115),10);'
*****************************************************************
For 93 million miles, there is nothing between the sun and my shadow
except me. I'm always getting in the way of something...

--
This message was sent through the gnu-cobol mailing list.  To remove yourself
from this mailing list, send a message to majordomo@lusars.net with the
words "unsubscribe gnu-cobol" in the message body.  For more information on
the GNU COBOL project, send mail to gnu-cobol-owner@lusars.net.