[Info-vax] COBOL Was: Re: Digital

[Wilm Boerhout]

Paul Sture mentioned  on 1-8-2012 16:28:
> On Wed, 01 Aug 2012 09:08:03 -0500, Bob Koehler wrote:
>
>> In article <stcne9-8nq2.ln1 at news1.chingola.ch>, Paul Sture
>> <paul at sture.ch> writes:
>>> On Tue, 31 Jul 2012 13:25:19 -0600, Bob Koehler wrote:
>>>
>>>>     And when we compiled it, it overflowed the COBOL line counter on
>>>>     DECSYSTEM 20s, leading to a nice latin message.
>>>
>>> I came across this mentality too.  Some obviously former COBOL
>>> programmer had written a huge DIBOL program on RSTS, with not a
>>> subroutine in sight.  It simply wouldn't fit into the available memory
>>> we had on RT-11 so we had to chop it up and use overlays.
>>
>>     OBTW, this was one subroutine.   I don't recall if it was one file,
>>     did DECSYSTEM-20 COBOL have the equivalent of an include statement?
>>
>>     Or maybe some of it was the DBMS interface providing all too many
>>     copies of schema definitions to the poorly written code.
>
> I never got my hands on a DECSYSTEM so don't know.  VAX-COBOL certainly
> had the equivalent of an include statement with COPY, though you cannot
> nest those.

And especially COPY REPLACING, making it a sort of compile-time 
subroutine, this came in handy to organize code.

/Wilm