The Punctilious Programmer Unit 3

Unit 3

  1. It is often the case that one program calls another program to accomplish a task.

    • This Video (17:33) discusses the complexities of
      having one program call another.
  2. Time to try Exercise #8 in which a main program calls a subprogram.

  3. Master the fundamentals of parameter passing with this exercise.

  4. Parameters can be passed “by reference” and “by content”.
    • This Video (4:04) covers both of
      these parameter passing techniques
  5. Try your hand at “passing parameters by reference” and “passing parameters by content”.

    • Here is the Video (0:45) that covers
      the details of Exercise #10.
  6. Next we tackle numeric and sign tests, three versions of INSPECT,and qualification of names.

  7. Cobol is a little unusal in that it doesn’t support user-defined functions. There are, however, many built-in “intrinsic” functions
    that you might find helpful.

  8. While the storage for all Cobol tables is statically allocated, Cobol does support variable length tables.

    • Here is the Video (5:53) that covers
      the details of variable length tables.
  9. Let’s use a variable length table in this challenging exercise. We will replicate the actions of a typical production program.

    • Here is the Video (4:28) that covers
      the details of building a program that makes reasonableness tests on address data.