Michael Coughlan

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  BOOKS FOR PROFESSIONALS BY PROFESSIONALS®

  Coughlan

  RELATED

  Beginning COBOL for Programmers

  Beginning COBOL for Programmers is a comprehensive, sophisticated tutorial and modular

  skills reference on the COBOL programming language for established programmers. This

  book is for you if you are a developer who would like to—or must—add COBOL to your

  repertoire. Perhaps you recognize the opportunities presented by the current COBOL skills

  crisis, or are working in a mission critical enterprise which retains legacy COBOL applications.

  Whatever your situation, Beginning COBOL for Programmers meets your needs as an

  established programmer moving to COBOL.

  Beginning COBOL for Programmers includes comprehensive coverage of ANS 85 COBOL

  features and techniques, including control structures, condition names, sequential and direct

  access files, data redefinition, string handling, decimal arithmetic, subprograms, and the

  report writer. The final chapter includes a substantial introduction to object-oriented COBOL.

  Benefiting from over one hundred example programs, you’ll receive an extensive

  introduction to the core and advanced features of the COBOL language and will learn to apply

  these through comprehensive and varied exercises. If you’ve inherited some legacy COBOL,

  you’ll be able to grasp the COBOL idioms, understand the constructs, and recognize what’s

  happening in the code you’re working with.

  Today’s enterprise application developers will find that COBOL skills open new—or old—

  doors, and this extensive COBOL reference is the book to help you acquire and develop your

  COBOL skills.

  What You’ll Learn:

  • The basics of COBOL and its control structures

  • How to declare and manipulate data, including tabular data

  • How to handle sequential, indexed, and relative files

  • How to SORT data and use Input and Output procedures

  • How to SEARCH tabular data

  • How to use contained and external subprograms to create modular programs

  • How to use the COBOL Report Writer

  • How to write ISO 2002 object-oriented COBOL programs

  Shelve in

  ISBN 978-1-4302-6253-4

  Programming Languages/COBOL

  55999

  User level:

  Beginning–Intermediate

  SOURCE CODE ONLINE

  9 781430 262534

  www.apress.com

  For your convenience Apress has placed some of the front

  matter material after the index. Please use the Bookmarks

  and Contents at a Glance links to access them.

  Contents at a Glance

  About the Author ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� xxi

  About the Technical Reviewer ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� xxiii

  Acknowledgments ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ xxv

  Preface ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� xxvii

  Chapter 1: Intr

  ■

  oduction to COBOL ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������1

  Chapter 2: COBOL Foundation

  ■

  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������17

  Chapter 3: Data Declar

  ■

  ation in COBOL �����������������������������������������������������������������������������37

  Chapter 4: Pr

  ■

  ocedure Division Basics �����������������������������������������������������������������������������55

  Chapter 5: Contr

  ■

  ol Structures: Selection �������������������������������������������������������������������������73

  Chapter 6: Contr

  ■

  ol Structures: Iteration ������������������������������������������������������������������������109

  Chapter 7: Intr

  ■

  oduction to Sequential Files �������������������������������������������������������������������131

  Chapter 8: Adv

  ■

  anced Sequential Files ���������������������������������������������������������������������������157

  Chapter 9: Edited Pictur

  ■

  es ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������181

  Chapter 10: Pr

  ■

  ocessing Sequential Files �����������������������������������������������������������������������205

  Chapter 11: Cr

  ■

  eating Tabular Data ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������247

  Chapter 12: Adv

  ■

  anced Data Declaration ���������������������������������������������
�����������������������������273

  Chapter 13: Sear

  ■

  ching Tabular Data ������������������������������������������������������������������������������303

  Chapter 14: Sorting and Mer

  ■

  ging ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������327

  Chapter 15: String Manipulation

  ■

  �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������361

  v

  ■ Contents at a GlanCe

  Chapter 16: Cr

  ■

  eating Large Systems �����������������������������������������������������������������������������399

  Chapter 17: Dir

  ■

  ect Access Files �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������435

  Chapter 18: The COBOL Report Writer

  ■

  ���������������������������������������������������������������������������477

  Chapter 19: OO-COBOL

  ■

  ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������519

  Index ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������547

  vi

  Chapter 1

  Introduction to COBOL

  When, in 1975, Edsger Dijkstra made his comment that “The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence,1” he gave voice to, and solidified, the opposition to COBOL in academia.

  That opposition has resulted in fewer and fewer academic institutions teaching COBOL so that now it has become difficult to find young programmers to replace the aging COBOL workforce.2-3 This scarcity is leading to an impending COBOL crisis. Despite Dijkstra’s comments and the claims regarding COBOL’s imminent death, COBOL remains

  a dominant force in the world of enterprise computing, and attempts to replace legacy COBOL systems have been shown to be difficult, dangerous, and expensive.

  In this chapter, I discuss some of the reasons for COBOL’s longevity. You’re introduced to the notion of an application domain and shown the suitability of COBOL for its target domain. COBOL is one of the oldest computer languages, and the chapter gives a brief history of the language and its four official versions. Later, the chapter presents the evidence for COBOL’s dominance in enterprise computing and discusses the enigma of its relatively low profile.

  An obvious solution to the scarcity of COBOL programmers is to replace COBOL with a more fashionable

  programming language. This chapter exposes the problems with this approach and reveals the benefits of retaining, renovating, and migrating the COBOL code.

  Finally, I discuss why learning COBOL and having COBOL on your résumé could be useful additions to your

  armory in an increasingly competitive job market.

  What Is COBOL?

  COBOL is a high-level programming language like C, C#, Java, Pascal, or BASIC, but it is one with a particular focus and a long history.

  COBOL’s Target Application Domain

  The name COBOL is an acronym that stands for Common Business Oriented Language, and this expanded acronym clearly indicates the target domain of the language. Whereas most other high-level programming languages are general-purpose, domain-independent languages, COBOL is focused on business, or enterprise, computing. You would not use COBOL to write a computer game or a compiler or an operating system. With no low-level access, no dynamic memory allocation, and no recursion, COBOL does not have the constructs that facilitate the creation of these kinds of program. This is one of the reasons most universities do not teach COBOL. Because it cannot be used to create data structures such as linked lists, queues, or stacks or to develop algorithms like Quicksort, some other programming language has to be taught to allow instruction in these computer science concepts. The curriculum is so crowded nowadays that there is often no room to introduce two programming languages, especially when one of them seems to offer little educational benefit.

  1

  Chapter 1 ■ IntroduCtIon to CoBoL

  Although COBOL’s design may preclude it from being used as a general-purpose programming language, it is

  well suited for developing long-lived, data-oriented business applications. COBOL’s forte is the processing of data transactions, especially those involving money, and this focus puts it at the heart of the mission-critical systems that run the world. COBOL is found in insurance systems, banking systems, finance systems, stock dealing systems, government systems, military systems, telephony systems, hospital systems, airline systems, traffic systems, and many, many others. It may be only a slight exaggeration to say that the world runs on COBOL.

  COBOL’s Fitness for Its Application Domain

  What does it mean to say that a language is well suited for developing business applications? What are the requirements of a language working in the business applications domain? In a series of articles on the topic, Professor Robert Glass4-7 concludes that such a programming language should exhibit the following characteristics:

  • It should be able to declare and manipulate heterogeneous data. Unlike other application

  domains, which mainly manipulate floating-point or integer numbers, business data is a

  heterogeneous mix of fixed and variable-length character strings as well as integer, cardinal,

  and decimal numbers.

  • It should be able to declare and manipulate decimal data as a native data type. In accounting, bank, taxation, and other financial applications, there is a requirement that computed

  calculations produce exactly the same result as those produced by manual calculations. The

  floating-point calculations commonly used in other application domains often contain minute

  rounding errors, which, taken over millions of calculations, give rise to serious accounting

  discrepancies.

  ■ Note the requirement for decimal data, and the problems caused by using floating-point numbers to represent money values, is explored more fully later in this book.

  • It should have the capability to conveniently generate reports and create a GUI. Just as

  calculating money values correctly is important for a business application, so is outputting

  the results in the format normally used for such business output. GUI screens, with their

  interactive charts and graphs, although a welcome addition to business applications, have not

  entirely eliminated the need for traditional reports
consisting of column headings, columns of

  figures, and a hierarchy of subtotals, totals, and final totals.

  • It should be able to access and manipulate record-oriented data masses such as files and

  databases. An important characteristic of a business application programming language is

  that it should have an external, rather than internal, focus. It should concentrate on processing

  data held externally in files and databases rather than on manipulating data in memory

  through linked lists, trees, stacks, and other sophisticated data structures.

  In an analysis of several programming languages with regard to these characteristics, Professor Glass6 finds that COBOL is either strong or adequate in all four of these characteristics, whereas the more fashionable domain-independent languages like Visual Basic, Java, and C++ are not. This finding is hardly a great surprise. With the exception of GUIs and databases, these characteristics were designed into COBOL from the outset.

  Advocates of domain-independent languages claim that the inadequacies of such a language for a particular

  application domain can be overcome by the use of function or class libraries. This is partly true. But programs written using bolted-on capabilities are never quite as readable, understandable, or maintainable as programs where these capabilities are an intrinsic part of the base language. As an illustration of this, consider the following two programs: one program is written in COBOL (Listing 1-1), and the other is written in Java (Listing 1-2).

  2

  Chapter 1 ■ IntroduCtIon to CoBoL

  Listing 1-1. COBOL Version

  IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.

  PROGRAM-ID. SalesTax.

  WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.

  01 beforeTax PIC 999V99 VALUE 123.45.

  01 salesTaxRate PIC V999 VALUE .065.

  01 afterTax PIC 999.99.

  PROCEDURE DIVISION.

  Begin.

 

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