Re: [open-cobol-list] organizing code in Cobol

[john Culleton]

On Tue, 22 Jan 2013 10:29:41 -0500
Patrick <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi Everyone
> 
> So I am working through online documentation about opencobol and
> cobol in general and making progress.
> 
> I have ordered several Cobol books but they won't be here for a while.
> 
> I was wondering in the meantime about a couple of things.....
> 
> 1)There are billions of Cobol lines in service but actually I have
> not been able to find any sizable Cobol codebases to study, just
> short snippets of code. Does anyone know of a project I could study?
> 
> Have people wrote these million line+ applications using just
> copybooks and compilation order to organize their code? I could see
> myself getting confused past about 10K lines.
> 
> 
> -Patrick
> 
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I generally write short programs linked together with CALL statements.

 Books by Mike Murach and Associates are worth buying. Most
college texts aren't. The Open Cobol 1.1 Programmer's Guide by 
Gary Cutler is an excellent reference. A book that has some
interesting examples and marks the beginnig of structured
programming in COBOL is "Modular Programming in COBOL" by Russell
M. Armstrong. ISBN 0-471-03325-1 published in 1973. I generally
write to the COBOL 85 standard. The more recent versions stray
from the original purposes of the language. And I use the
original paragraphs of the IDENTIFICATION DIVISION, including a
meanigful *REMARKS paragraph. It is the mark of a professional COBOL
programmer IMO. Its deletion from the the standard was totally foolish,
again IMO. 

John Culleton
COBOL since 1968.

-- 
John Culleton
Wexford Press
Free list of books for self-publishers:
http://wexfordpress.net/shortlist.html
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