Re: Disassembler



<ozzy.kopec@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1141046648.949404.165450@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Pete Dashwood wrote:

Why would you need to disassemble something you have the source to? If
you
have the source fo the record definitions it is reasonable to suppose you
have the source of the programs...? Am I missing something here?

Pete.

Had a bud who's boss had them print out the source for every COBOL
program they had. They did incremental and full backups, but sure
enough after a hard drive crash they were missing a few programs. The
secretary hand entered the code from the printed listings so for once a
boss had a good idea :0)

Once long ago, but not in a distant galaxy, some of us wrote source code
based on the premise that it might need to be re-entered (actually,
re-punched into cards) from a listing.

To try and make life easier for the punch girls (note deliberate political
incorrectness; I never saw a man do this job, although most of us could use
a hand punch prettty quickly) we left 'clues' in our COBOL source.

The girls were aware that COBOL procedure statements started after column 11
and that procedure names started in column 8. They recognised comments and
debug elements in 7, program source deck identifiers in 73 - 80, and line
sequences in 1 -6. They used 'program' drums on their punch machines that
allowed them to tab to these key columns instantly.

Pretty straightforward.

But the Data Division was more difficult.

To this day I structure data definitions in COBOL as follows:

01 record level.
12 first-subfield.
15 first-subsubfield pic (whatever...).
12 next-subfield pic (whatever...).

The level numbers indicate what column the data should start in. They knew
that 01 levels had to be in 8 and pictures in 36 (the last was simply a
local standard, based on what IBM did... :-))

I can think of at least two separate sites (and a number of occasions on
both of them) where we were very glad to have source recreated from listings
after decks of cards got shredded or minced in various readers or were
destroyed by water after a storm where part of the roof was removed...

Maybe your bud's Boss was an oldtimer like me :-)

Pete.







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