Re: [open-cobol-list] A Question about COBOL Syntax

[John R. Culleton]

On Tuesday 13 September 2005 03:16 pm, Robert Sherry wrote:
>    Please consider the following statement:
>              ACCEPT X FROM ENVIRONMENT-VALUE.
> This statement is from a program the test suite of the Open Source COBOL
> compiler. In the program, ENVIRONMENT-VALUE is not defined as a data item.
> Could somebody please tell me what this syntax means?
>
> Thanks,
> Bob Sherry
I will take a stab at it, subject to correction by someone more
knowledgeable.

In Unix and similar systems an entity can be created that
contains a value and is available to any program that needs it.
On Linux some of these values can be established by a "set" statement. 
To get a list of all of them I enter the command "set" with no
parameters. Typically the names of the environment variables are
in upper case. Some typical variables:
PATH
PWD
USER
UID
etc. 

So I presume if you were to ACCEPT the variable PWD you would
get the path of the current working directory.

AFAIK
-- 
John Culleton
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