Month: May 2020

I have added a tab (Course Datasets) at the top of the blog to help provide input data for the programs referenced in the COBOL course.

In the case of input files that contain packed data, I am including a COBOL program that will produce the input file when you run it. Each COBOL program takes its own data from an in-stream dataset. I’m including the COBOL code and the JCL surrounding it to make things easier. You will have to adjust the file names.

In the case textual data files, I’m including a copy of the input data which you can paste into a member in a PDS to create the input file.

Let me know if I can help.

I had lots of fun this morning on IBM’s COBOL FRIDAY with Sudharsana Srinivasan and Paul Newton. I talked mostly about COBOL intrinsic functions, but we also considered what to do if you wanted to write something that sort of works like a user-defined function. Enterprise COBOL doesn’t support user-defined functions just yet, but it’s in the works. My work-around involves writing nested programs. You can watch the webcast here if you are interested. I also posted some sample code at the Enterprise COBOL tab that goes along with the talk. The STACKY program does dynamic allocation and creates a stack for storing pointers to records. It uses a nested programming style to create the data structure.