COBOL still rocks in the Steel City!
I’ve noticed some questions online about the use of positional parameters in COBOL. Let me give you a quick example of how to use them. Let’s say, for example, that you have a date in the format of MMDDYY (MonthDayYear), … Read More »
In recent years, attempts have been made to present COBOL with a more youthful face by allowing the language to be used in a Windows environment. I believe this is the proverbial “square peg in a round hole”. … Read More »
The PICTURE Clause… You can define how many characters COBOL uses to store each piece of data. You can also specify what type of characters (alphabetic, numeric, etc) that each data field can hold, and you can set up special … Read More »
Think of the PERFORM verb as a round-trip ticket, and the GO TO statement as a one-way ticket. The PERFORM verb causes execution of a paragraph elsewhere in the program and then immediately returns to its starting point. The GO … Read More »
Let me start by saying that I genuinely like COBOL. That’s right, I do. Some developers think of it as being outdated and antiquated, but I strongly disagree. Although COBOL may lack some of the bells and whistles of the newer … Read More »
Every programming blog must include a “Hello World” program, right? Here’s what is required to display “Hello World” in COBOL. Yes, indeed, COBOL is verbose, but still lovable…
OK, so let’s get started…. First of all, COBOL is a compiled language, which means that you will need a COBOL compiler available. The job of the compiler is to convert the easy to read English language of the program into machine language that the computer … Read More »