Course Description

Advanced Topics in COBOL
(Enterprise, z/OS)

This course: course objectives; course outline;
Related curriculum; Topic list; Course list; Home page

Benefits

Students who complete this course will be able to code mainline programs and subroutines, passing arguments and receiving parameters, including nested programs, exernal subroutines, and static and dynamic linkages.

In addition, the student will gain theory and practice in building and working with tables and variable length records using subscripts and indexes, and with using the string handling capabilities of COBOL.

Audience

Experienced COBOL programmers who need to maintain or create programs that use subroutine linkages, work with tables, or use string handling facilities; beginning COBOL programmers in an intensive training program.

Prerequisites

The student should have a good background in coding basic COBOL programs, such as might be obtained in successfully completing D-715, "Structured COBOL Workshop for Enterprise COBOL".

Related IBM Materials

This course is drawn from these IBM manuals; access to them in the classroom is desirable but not required:

SC27-1408 - COBOL Language Reference
SC27-1412 - COBOL Programming Guide

• Subroutines and CALL, passing arguments and receiving parameters
• Nested programs and external subroutines
• Static versus dynamic CALLs
• CALL ... ON OVERFLOW and CALL ... ON EXCEPTION; CANCEL
• COMMON, GLOBAL, INITIAL, and EXTERNAL attributes
• Defining tables (single- and multi-dimensional)
• Initializing and sorting tables
• PERFORM ... VARYING
• Subscripts and indexes
• SET, SEARCH, SEARCH ALL
• ALL subscripting (intrinsic functions)
• Variable length record processing
• INSPECT, STRING, UNSTRING
• COBOL SORT facility
• Dynamic File Allocation
• Pointer, procedure-pointer, and function-pointer data types

Exercises

There are 11 hands-on exercises.

Platforms Supported

The exercises are designed for IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS & OS/390; Other compilers may also work.