That is very true. (and has been considered
as an alternative).
But it is more convenient to maintain
a single parm card versus a COBOL program (in my opinion).
This is especiallly true when it comes
to the OUTREC statements, for creating additional output files.
This is probably more for me, since
I have been working with SORT on the mainframe for over 7 years and like
the flexiblity of it.
Since I'm posting things now, here is
what brought me to OpenCobol, and why I'll ask that things that I do.
I work for a Software vendor, so the
product is tested on both Mainframe and Unix (AIX, Sun, and HP).
We are testing OpenCobol as an alternative
to other compilers, mainly due to cost.
We try to keep the Mainframe JCL and
Unix scripts in sync, which includes a sort utitlity.
I didn't mention it, but I would be
willing to put something together and test, after getting a little guidance
on how to interface with the sort functions that are in libcob.
I looked at the c code that is generated,
and it seems that setting the keys and dynamically creating the file objects
(structs) would be the part that would be needed (but again, I took a c
class a long time ago, but fake my way through it ok. It would be
a good learning opportunity).