Re: COBOL ain't quite dead - yet !



In article <7isgg4lh42b61712dijr6otf1otsscuj92@xxxxxxx>,
Howard Brazee <howard@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:44:59 -0600, "tlmfru" <lacey@xxxxxxx> wrote:

What was worse was PERFORMING a label and then, within the scope of that
PERFORM doing a GOTO to it as well. That isn't formally forbidden but
always struck me as a chancy thing to do. (It was a method used to
implement loops before PERFORM/END-PERFORM was available).

When I worked for EDS a decade or more ago, our published standard was
for each perform to be of a section that consisted of a paragraph and
an exit which wasn't used.

'... a section that consisted of a paragraph and an exit which hasn't been
used'; I'm not sure how to parse this.

A10532-BUILD SECTION.
A10533-BUILD-RTN.
....
A10533-BUILD-EXIT.
EXIT

B21855-VERIFY SECTION
B21855-VERIFY-RTN.
....
B21855-VERIFY-EXIT.

.... et and cetera... but with never a GO TO -EXIT to control flow? I can
see how this evolved out of SECTION-based programming and page-size and
tuning and swapping and such arcana... but never 'using' an exit denied a
programmer an alternative to a SEARCH (for those weeks when said
programmer finds that such a imperative is forbidden because someone
didn't understand it) in the Oldene Dayse when in-line PERFORMS hadn't
been implemented.

DD
.



Relevant Pages

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