Advanced Topics in COBOL (Enterprise, z/OS)

Course Number:  645-TF
Recommended Duration:  3 days

Intended 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.

Course Overview
The exercises are designed for IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS & OS/390; Other compilers may also work.  There are 11 hands-on exercises.

Objectives
Students who complete this course will be able to code mainline programs and subroutines, passing arguments and receiving parameters, including nested programs, external 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.

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".

Topics

• 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