Joe Zitzelberger wrote:
On May 24, 2005, at 10:40 AM, Jon Brock wrote:
I can guarantee that the majority of our application programmers would
not know it is possible. And that includes the good ones.
[snip]
I find that amazingly unbelievable.
Learning how to invoke separate compile units is usually taught in
basic-intro-to-programming-101 classes somewhere after providing output
to the user ("hello world, my name is variable") and before opening a file.
Humor me. Take this snippet to some of your COBOL programmers, good and
bad, and ask them if they can write a program that will invoke it.
----------------------------
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. PGMRTEST.
ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
DATA DIVISION.
LINKAGE SECTION.
01 INPUT-PARMS.
05 INPUT-PARM-LEN BINARY PIC S9(4).
05 INPUT-PARM-DATA OCCURS 0 TO 100 DEPENDING INPUT-PARM-LEN
PIC X.
PROCEDURE DIVISION USING INPUT-PARMS.
IF INPUT-PARM-LEN > 0
DISPLAY 'Application programmers are not really that stupid
after all.'
ELSE
DISPLAY 'OK, maybe they are really stupid.'
END-IF
GOBACK.
-----------------------------
You might find yourself surprised at how capable they can be.
I suspect that even the 'bad' ones will be able to invoke this with
ease, without using 'EXEC PGM='.
I doubt it. You get 'em with the word "invoke". And besides,
that wasn't the point being made. The point was most COBOL
programmers do not know you can get parm data from a main
program.
Kind regards,
-Steve Comstock
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO
Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
