Very cool! printf() and its variants would bring a lot of power to COBOL. USS file manipulation. Math functions beyond what is available in native COBOL. strftime().
Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John McKown Sent: Thursday, April 6, 2017 1:52 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Opinion: Using C "standard library" routines in COBOL. This is just a curiosity poll on my part. I'm wondering if anyone out there has ever really used any C standard library routines (versus user written code) in a COBOL program. I know that many may wonder "Why? What do I get out of it." IMO, there are some useful routines in the standard C library which could be used in COBOL. One in particular which shows up quickly is the C language "cuserid()" function. It will return the RACF id under which the program is running. Now, since cuserid() plops a LOW-VALUE as an end-of-string delimiter, that needs to be taken into consideration. Something like the following worked for me: 01 USERID-PLUS-1 05 USERID PIC X(8). 05 FILLER PIC X. 01 CUSERID-POINTER POINTER. CALL 'CUSERID' USING USERID-PLUS-1. as did CALL 'CUSERID' USING USERID-PLUS-1 RETURNING CUSERID-POINTER. But this latter is unnecessary since the ID will be in USERID. But it might have a LOW-VALUE, so it is better to do a MOVE SPACES TO USERID before the CALL and a INSPECT USERID REPLACING LOW-VALUES BY SPACES after the call. There are a lot more "interesting" C library functions which might be useful. Such as the regular expression library for advanced text scanning (OK, not a big COBOL thing). How about __get_cpuid() to get the CPU id of the processor you're running on? DES encryption of data? The sprintf() function to create a nicely formatted human readable message easily (not a lot of space padding) although STRING might do this as well. On older compilers, use the "calloc()" and "malloc()" function to get dynamic storage areas to map with the LINKAGE SECTION. How about using "popen()" to fire up a UNIX process to do some work for you? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
