Unfortunately in COBOL there isn’t an “elegant” way to find out the number of parameters passed into a called program. Unless your COBOL compiler provides a proprietary function (I think isCOBOL has one) the only way I’m aware of is testing the address of the parameters declared in the LINKAGE SECTION. The following two programs […]
COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) is one of the first widely used languages and for many years the most popular language in the business community. It developed from the 1959 Conference on Data Systems Languages, a joint initiative between the U.S. government and the private sector. COBOL was created to fulfill two major objectives: portability and readability. The death of COBOL has been predicted many times. In 1960 Howard Bromberg gave a tombstone to Charles Phillips, Chairman of the CODASYL Executive Committee, because so many people were predicting an early death. Similar predictions have been made every year since then. But COBOL lives on. Read more in the posts below…
Write a text file using fopen, fwrite and fclose
The following program writes same sample data to a flat file using native Unix/Linux C APIs, it will run as is only in Unix/Linux environment. The program has been tested using Dell Enterprise COBOL and executed in Dell TPE. The same program can be compiled and executed using any available re-hosting platform for LUW. 1 […]
Exporting TS QUEUE data to a flat file
The following program extracts all the items of a TS queue and write them to a flat file. The program has been tested using Dell Enterprise COBOL and executed in Dell TPE. The same program can be compiled and executed using any available re-hosting platform for LUW. Please note that the program uses native Unix/Linux […]
Confessions of a Cobol programmer
by Tam Harbert Last summer, Michael Vu, a 40-year-old independent IT consultant, found himself in a wholly unexpected place midway through his career. He’d signed a three-week contract to help a major U.S. retailer with an enterprise reporting project. The initial work was so successful that the project was extended. As a consequence, Vu was […]
Is your next language COBOL?
by Michael Swaine In July, citing a budget shortfall, the Governor of California ordered the salaries of 170,000 State employees to be cut to the Federal minimum wage. Not so fast, said the State Controller. Because California’s payroll systems are written in antiquated Cobol code, it would take six months to implement the change and […]
SLEEP using CEE3DLY
CEE3DLY provides a service for Language Environment-conforming applications that suspends the processing of the active enclave for a specified number of seconds. The maximum is 1 hour. Syntax >>-CEE3DLY–(–input_seconds–,–fc–)————————->< input_seconds A full-word binary value in the range of 0 to 3600 that specifies the total number of seconds during which the enclave should be suspended. […]
COBOL
COBOL (/ˈkoʊbɒl/) is a compiled computer programming language designed for business use. It is imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented. It was designed in 1959 by the Conference on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL) and was largely based on previous programming language design work by Grace Hopper, commonly referred to as “the mother of COBOL”. COBOL […]
Get current TIMESTAMP using CEELOCT
CEELOCT returns the current local date or time in three formats: Lilian date (the number of days since 14 October 1582) Lilian seconds (the number of seconds since 00:00:00 14 October 1582) Gregorian character string (in the form YYYYMMDDHHMISS999) These values are compatible with other Language Environment date and time services, and with existing language […]