On Mon, 13 Mar 2017 10:23:12 -0500, John McKown <john.archie.mck...@gmail.com> wrote:
>I took a quick look at XPLINK. And you're right, that's a whole 'nother >kettle of fish. I basically understand the why, as explained in the LE >manuals. But why COBOL decided to go with the same, other than >inter-operation with C, is beyond my tiny (and shrinking) mind. Even with >nested COBOL programs, I don't see COBOL programmers writing "tons" of >"itty bitty" COBOL programs. But C/C++ programs do that a lot, especially >C++ programmers. > COBOL programmers traditionally use paragraphs/SECTIONs and PERFORM for the itty-bitty. There is an interesting development. For "contained/nested" programs, the optimiser can now "inline" the CALLs, so that a CALL to a contained program looks like a PERFORM of a paragraph/SECTION. Previously with Enterprise COBOL, there was a lesser overhead with a CALL to a contained/nested program than to an external program. So you could now have lots of itty-bitty (contained) programs, which behave like paragraphs/SECTIONS but with "localised" data-names. I don't know (no access to V5+) exactly how this pans out (there may be limits to how much can be inlined, as with paragrpahs/SECTIONs themselves) but it may offer a "different" way to develop COBOL programs. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
