Re: Cobol Subprocedures, Prototype definitions and interfaces, etc.

On 02/08/2010, at 11:05 AM, steelville wrote:

But forthcoming in the shop are some big changes there might be a need
to be able to introduce the use of subprocedures, but I can't find a
reference for the Cobol language that actually gets into how to do this
in ILE Cobol! And that's even using the ILE Cobol reference! But poking
around InfoCenter didn't help me either.

Procedures in the RPG (and other language) sense don't exist in COBOL (not even the ILE version). You can call them from COBOL but you can't create them in COBOL. COBOL went down the nested program path instead and its not the same. You could create callable routines (one per module) in COBOL, bind them into a service program, and get something similar to RPG procedures but there still invoked via the
CALL PROCEDURE x USING y RETURNING z
syntax.

COBOL procedures can't RETURN values (i.e. can't be used in an expression) but only via return parameters.

No prototype support either and a peculiarity where you must use the same syntax on all calls to a given procedure i.e., if you call it once with RETURNING then you must specify RETURNING on all other calls to that procedure even if you don't care about the result.

Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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