[Info-vax] COBOL Was: Re: Digital

[Fritz Wuehler]

Wilm Boerhout <wboerhout-remove at this-gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

Those are copies of IBM features (COPY, COPY REPLACING) and like IBM you
can't nest COPY REPLACINGs.