On May 24, 2005, at 10:40 AM, Jon Brock wrote:
I can guarantee that the majority of our application programmers would
not know it is possible. And that includes the good ones.
Jon
<snip>
And why would you expect an application programmer writing in COBOL to
even
know that manual exists? Why should he/she even know it's possible
for
the programs to be invoked by anything other than EXEC PGM=... )where
a
100-byte parm limit has existed forever)?
What applications programmer wouldn't know that it is possible?
</snip>
I find that amazingly unbelievable.
Learning how to invoke separate compile units is usually taught in
basic-intro-to-programming-101 classes somewhere after providing
output to the user ("hello world, my name is variable") and before
opening a file.
Humor me. Take this snippet to some of your COBOL programmers, good
and bad, and ask them if they can write a program that will invoke it.
----------------------------
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. PGMRTEST.
ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
DATA DIVISION.
LINKAGE SECTION.
01 INPUT-PARMS.
05 INPUT-PARM-LEN BINARY PIC S9(4).
05 INPUT-PARM-DATA OCCURS 0 TO 100 DEPENDING INPUT-PARM-LEN
PIC X.
PROCEDURE DIVISION USING INPUT-PARMS.
IF INPUT-PARM-LEN > 0
DISPLAY 'Application programmers are not really that stupid after
all.'
ELSE
DISPLAY 'OK, maybe they are really stupid.'
END-IF
GOBACK.
-----------------------------
You might find yourself surprised at how capable they can be.
I suspect that even the 'bad' ones will be able to invoke this with
ease, without using 'EXEC PGM='.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
The most effective type of birth control is learning Cobol. -DT
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