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

Thanks Simon!

Sorry for the delay in the thanks. I appreciate the help.

Geez. And they wanted everybody to do EGL and generate Cobol?! Wow. Not that I should have been surprised, though.

Among other things, my idea was that there might be a real need for it, but it was also to help the all-Cobol developers get a look at subprocedures. New development is mostly RPG, a couple of the programmers are primarily Cobol, we all work on both.

--aec

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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