[Info-vax] New VSI Roadmap (yipee!)

[John Reagan]

On Tuesday, March 3, 2015 at 11:26:30 AM UTC-5, David Froble wrote:
 
> But yes, what you suggest would be a good thing.  Modular programming 
> techniques lead to calling subroutines and external functions, and 
> improving that would be helpful.
> 
> How do other languages handle such?

By not having to walk the stack to get context info from their parent routine.

COBOL has some overhead in the prologue also to handle INITIAL routines to see if it has to reinitialize variables or not.  COBOL CANCEL is not your friend if you are looking for performance.  I think you'll find calls to DCOB$CALLED in most every COBOL prologue.  Fortunately, most COBOL writers don't use separate programs (routines, for the rest of use) but stick with twisty mazes of PARAGRAPHs (which have their own overhead to control where a paragraph might 'return' to).