I appreciate the links. I had been to some of them but somehow missed that tutorial. I will be going through some of it this evening. I also liked that it linked to the webring, I will be checking that out too.
Once again thanks kindly and best regards, Joseph James Frantz
Bob <address@hidden> wrote:
Yes, Cobol is column-oriented. Columns 1-6 were originally for line numbers, but now is just comments (not checked by most compilers at all). Column 7 should be blank except for line comments, when it should be an asterisk *.
Sorry, no Cobol books in particular to recommend. I only have one from 1980 that I haven't looked at in many years.
On-line, I tend to reference the MF Cobol manuals (but then I work mostly with MF Cobol at client sites). They do have MF enhancements
marked, so you'll know those aren't standard Cobol. http://supportline.microfocus.com/documentation/books/oc41books/lrpubb.htm
You also might check out "The Cobol Center" website, or the Cobol User Groups site. http://infogoal.com/cbd/cbdhome.htm http://www.cobug.com/
Here you can find an entire Cobol course on-line. http://www.csis.ul.ie/cobol/
Have fun, Bob ============= On Monday 09 April 2007 2:02 pm, address@hidden wrote: Mr. Bob,
Thanks dude! I just removed the line numbers and it worked fine. Pasting code will be pretty simple now. I think I can even do it in gedit. It wont give me the syntax highlighting. But I can work with it anyhow.
I never knew you could do that with comments in those 6 spaces. Very convenient. Also I assume everything has that everything has to start in column 8? With column 7 being blank?
Any suggestions on some good cobol books? I
don't mind spending dough to learn this stuff.
Thanks kindly and best regards, Joseph James Frantz
Bob wrote: Vince,
Here's the highlighter file for Kate. I didn't post to the list earlier because I'd done that last year sometime and didn't want to bother people again with the hilighter xml file, even if it does compress to 5K (I haven't touched it since then).
Joseph,
The highlighter file is just that - syntax highlighting, nothing more (no line-numbering, no command-completion, no online-help, etc). I don't know of any editors under Unix that will put out line numbering, especially keeping the line numbers straight when you add new lines in the middle, though you may be able to write a script or something. Line numbers are not required in general, and for most Cobol's, those first 6 columns are treated as comments, so you can leave them blank.
Kate is configurable for
many things, including tabs. Look under Configure/Editor/Editing for "insert spaces instead of tabs". Also under Indentation, which has some other tab-related settings.
Also note that if you're copying from files that came from Windows/Dos (old program files), they may have return+linefeed instead of the usual Unix linefeed only for line endings. I don't know offhand if Kate will convert that automatically for you or not, but if not you may end up with some lines ending in linefeed and others in return+linefeed. To track down what is happening, try opening the file using khexedit - a KDE binary editor that will let you see each char, including all control chars.