Re: Procedure equivalent in Cobol

[Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm not Simon (but I have played him on TV ...)

My biggest annoyance with COBOL is that you cannot export a nested  
program (or have multiple "programs" in a single source) and allow it  
to be called from outside.  There are also restrictions on how nested  
programs work but that's a different issue.

In RPG if I have a group of related subprocedures I can place them all  
in one source where they can share any "service" functions that are  
common to the group.  The architecture of ILE COBOL does not permit  
that.  It was supposed to (I wrote the original outline design  
document) but it wasn't implemented that way.

This just makes it very clumsy when trying to implement that kind of  
functionality.  Way more source files than need be and access to  
Globals even when useful/justified.

Other annoyances are lack of prototyping (with resulting programmer  
dependent parameter matching) etc.

On the other hand I would love RPG to have COBOL's ability to pass  
parameters by copy (like RPG's CONST but it _always_ happens)

Just my 2 cents worth.


Jon Paris

www.Partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com



On 30-Sep-09, at 10:08 PM, MichaelQuigley@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Simon,
>
> What's so different about the ILE architecture of COBOL vs RPG?  RPG  
> does
> allow you to code subprocedures like function which is very cool.  
> However,
> you can still perform the same function by using 'CALL PROCEDURE'.  My
> recollection is that the structure of the program objects is the same.
> I've written several programs to take advantage of this when I want to
> hide internal procedures within a service program.
>
> Michael Quigley