Mike Schwab wrote: <begin extract> Easytrieve plus has a case structure and end-???. I assume you would need Cobol 2 or higher to have equivalent structures. </end extract>
and this is correct in the sense that straightforward mapping of one case figure into another one---SWITCH in C or SELECT in PL/I say---is not possible in versions of COBOL that antedate its EVALUATE statement. Any such Easytrieve figure can, however, be implemented in COBOL without any conceptual or practical difficulty using nested if-then-else statements. Moreover, before COBOL 5.1, which does optimize case-like constructions elegantly, this is anyway what you get in compiled code for EVALUATEs. Even very simple branch tables of the sort used to implement C and C-like SWITCH statements are not [yet] provided. COBOL 5.2 is a very large step forward in performance; and the fact that this has not been much talked about by its potential users has led me to suspect that the managers of many COBOL shops do not really care much about performance. Typically---There are of course some honorable exceptions---they are hardware hawks who would rather throw another or a faster machine at a performance problem than address it directly. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
