The Punctilious Programmer Unit 2

Unit 2

  1. Controling the flow of execution in a program is a fundamental programming skill.
    • This video that covers the commands that provide logic in your Cobol programs. Video (32:50)
  2. Let’s dive deeper into the Procedure Division by studying tables.
    • Watch the following video that covers how
      to create and process Cobol tables Video (23:07)
  3. It’s time to build some skills with Cobol tables by writing a program.
  4. To be a master Cobol programmer, you need to know how to use indexes for Cobol table processing.
    • Here are the instructions
      for your third exercise: Video 0:41)
  5. Once you have built a table, you’ll often need to search for a table entry based on a particular key. In Cobol, there are two
    built-in verbs for doing that.

    • Let’s tackle the first one (SEARCH) with the material in this Video (11:31) .
  6. Get some practice using SEARCH.
  7. The second verb you can use to search a Cobol table is called SEARCH ALL. This type of search performs a binary search of
    a table, and is much faster for large tables than a sequential search.

  8. Cobol supports string operations with a technique called reference modification.
  9. Cobol has a few “exotic” commands for working with strings – commands that are only used in special circumstances, but are very powerful and handy
    when needed.

  10. The companion to STRING is UNSTRING.
  11. Let’s build our skills with STRING and UNSTRING.
    • This Video (2:29) discusses the details of exercises #6 and #7.