I had a programmer as whether a PERFORM could be recursive. The answer is "No". I even tried to explain why. But he says that if he could do it, it would save some "really messy" coding. So I thought that I'd ask here if anyone has ever heard of a way to do something which would be similar to a recursive PERFORM. I've always heard that recursion can be replaced with a stack and iterative programming. But I've not come up with a way to do this, nicely, in COBOL. Perhaps that is the "messiness" to which the programmer was referring. Perhaps because COBOL doesn't implement stacks either. So a stack must be implemented with a array and a current-index-value variable, perhaps defined as INDEXED BY.
I was looking into using nested programs which were recursive. But that turns out to not be possible. RECURSIVE programs can't have nested programs. And nested programs can't be RECURSIVE. -- This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. If this had been an actual emergency, do you really think we'd stick around to tell you? Maranatha! <>< John McKown ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
