Modern COBOL: Professional Programmer's Fast-Track

All COBOL programs are divided into (1) WORDS, either user defined or reserved (2) SENTANCES ending with a PERIOD, and (3) PARAGRAPHS consisting of several sentences.

Discover how GnuCOBOL's "Mall Map" can help understand Modern COBOL whilst working the "Cobol Commons."

From "Card Languages" (J.C.L) to command-line "Shells," Modern COBOL can be about working smarter, not harder?

So when it came time to compare GnuCOBOL's intrinsically-included Functions with those of the 2014 Standard, it is just another case of "PyBOL," to the rescue?

Prepare yourself to explore COBOL's PAST STANDARDs to better understand your client / employer's Modern COBOL Standard!

The way GnuCOBOL's Command-Line Interface (CLI) operates has much in common with other Modern COBOL Compilers. So too the CDF, which includes meta-information into our COBOL programs.

To Unicode, Or Not?

Resuming a familiar demonstration, in this lesson it is time to explore other COBOL Divisions!

Every Data Division is in the CENTER of the COBOL Commons. So too are the PERFROM and the dreaded GO TO reserved words!

Ever a debugging activity, using GO TO is not the ONLY way to loose control of a program.

A better way to exit any loop?

COBOL had the concept of "enumerations" from the beginning - but why?

Why the "Outside Common" areas are also important.

How to index and search an internal data table.

COBOL has ever defined "searching & sorting" as a key mission.

Firmly enthroned as part of "The COBOL Commons," here is a quick & easy way to sort the previous alphabetic table / array in memory and in-place.

Dynamically SORTing user input allows us to delve into the reserved ACCEPT word, another Level 88, as well as an extremely common reason to use the relatively common FUNCTION TRIM.

The first challenge - Can you create a user-defined, sortable? User requested, on-demand sorting for either an ascending, or a descending result?

When to know that we'll need to re-factor...

Whilst jumping back to 'whenst we came is easy to understand, most feel that - much like our diagrams - having but a single start & entry location is a good idea.

COBOL's reserved CONTINUE word is an easy, one-line way to gracefully exit our PERFROM block.

Documenting what we have just coded is not a very common requirement. -A great way to lock-in what we have learned however, here is what we came up with to document our solution to the previous activity.

Taking it slowly, let's review how to read a file to sort those 26 characters in program memory.

The most "human readable" file type, when we start COBOL we should understand how to create reports for us to read - as well as describe what happens whenever we do not. =)

The opposite of "line sequential" files, the system / space delimited file format (.SDF) is designed to quickly hop-around files having fixed-length record sizes.

COBOL's default sorting mechanism allows us to easily sort data of all sizes using external files.

Custom file sorting can be complex - so let's keep our data the same and master those procedures one step at a time.

Keeping the familiar memory sort - but what else might we do with the data?

Finishing up by saving our sort, the challenge is to practice what you've learned.

Let's take a look at the good, as well as the bad, that A.I can do for I.T.

Ever learning, both the good and bad news is that A.I can do no better than what others have done.

Let's take a look at what we still need to fix.

Taking a playfull pass at re-generating the code, witness how A.I has more to fear from us, than we do from it.