Re: [open-cobol-list] Which formatting convention to use?

[David Essex]

Duke Normandin wrote:
>  .... 
> I hear you. I have similar feeling with the Win-doze folks....

Their new motto is ...
If you can't beat'em with brilliance, beat'em with patents !

But I digress ...


> BTW, I still have not found an explanation of how the free format
> differs from the fixed. Is it only Col 1-6 that is done away with?

Well there are several variations.
OC follows what is defined the 2002 standard.

Here is a brief outline.
The columns 1-6, 73-80, legacy requirements have been removed.
Colum 72 no longer has special meaning.
Areas A and B are no longer required.
The special characters in columns 7 have been removed or replaced.

Some examples ...

The line comment character '*' in columns 7 has been replaced by the
to-the-end-of-the-line comment string '*>'.
While some compilers will allow a character '*' in columns 1,
to denote a line comment, OC will flag it as an error.

For multi-line value clauses one can use concatenation ('&') (ex. value
'abc' & 'cde').

There is a program called 'htcobf2f', included with TC, which will
convert COBOL sources to and from fixed/free formats.
Unfortunately it is not been updated to the COBOL 2002 standard.

Hope this helps.