Re: CALL using OMITTED

On 9/26/2008 at 8:43 PM, in message <p5hDk.137$J63.102@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
James
J. Gavan<jgavandeletethis@xxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm fascinated that you always seem to go looking for problems that you
can create in COBOL. What's wrong with KISS ?

I am not looking for problems. (Well, not in this case, at least!) I am
looking for solutions.

I'm always looking for ways to make things more flexible and dynamic, and I
look for ways that Cobol can help with this. I thought that this might be
one such case.

Simple is good. Simple and powerful is better.

So in both examples you have A, B, C and D as pic x(04). What's so
complicated about :-

move spaces to C and D, when appropriate, before you do the CALL

(or any other combination of the four parameters) ???

Nothing is complicated about that. What I was looking for was a way to
leave alone a program that has:

move 'mysubr' to subroutine
call subroutine using p1 p2 p3

when program 'mysubr' has been change to support a fourth parameter, ie:

procedure division using parm1 parm2 parm3 parm4

Say there are 20 programs that call 'mysubr'. Only two of them care about
this new, fourth, parameter. The only reason that the other 18 programs
need to be touched is because they need to pass to the new version of mysubr
a data area to hold data which they don't even care about.

I hope you don't think I made this problem up just for fun. I had an
actually case a few years ago when this would have been useful. Of course
we lived without it.

Frank

.