John McKown wrote: <begin extract> I'm certain that the programmer will want each separate program to have equal access to the WORKING-STORAGE of the "main" routine. Which means having all, or most, of the WORKING-STORAGE in a COPY book with the EXTERNAL attribute on all the 01 and 77 levels. </end extract>
That is certainly one way, a dubious traditional way, to do things. If, however, your programmer is up to using recursion then he or she is up to declaring a COBOL analogue of an HLASM DSECT or a PL/I based structure and passing a pointer to it to these new entries. This sort of thing is now eminently possible in Enterprise COBOL. COBOL is not my favorite statement-level language, but it is now in its post-CODASYL form a much better language than it once was. The real question is: Does a COBOL shop wish to use these new and quite powerful facilities? Or does it want to continue to use circa-1970 technology? John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
