[Info-vax] The option to the Cobol foreground-color/background-color options

[Jan-Erik Söderholm]

Den 2021-08-14 kl. 18:00, skrev Dave Froble:
> On 8/14/2021 10:46 AM, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
>> Den 2021-08-14 kl. 14:43, skrev Jan-Erik Söderholm:
>>> Hi.
>>>
>>> When defining screens using the "screen section" in Cobol,
>>> one can add "foreground-color is n" and "background-color is n".
>>>
>>> Now, the numeric parameter n has valid values between 0 and 7.
>>> But our terminal emulator (and the ANSI/VT ESC sequence standard)
>>> has 16 settings. In our emulator (Extra!) they are 0-15.
>>>
>>> 0="black"
>>> 7="white"
>>> 15="bright white"
>>>
>>> If I try to set the value to 15 I get:
>>>
>>>
>>> %COBOL-F-SCRCOLVAL, FOREGROUND-COLOR or BACKGROUND-COLOR clause
>>>    value must be between 0 and 7 inclusive.
>>>
>>> We are looking at options like redefining "colour 7" in Extra!
>>> to be 255,255,255 (pure white) instead of the current 192,192,192
>>> which results in a light grey background.
>>>
>>> I'll ask VSI directly also if this restriction can be expanded
>>> to include all colour options as can be seen here:
>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#Colors
>>> but thought I'd just ask if someone have seen this before
>>> and might have some other solution.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Jan-Erik.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> I have added one additional request to VSI. An option in the
>> "screen section" that simply disables all colour changing
>> commands from the compiler. Our default colours in the
>> terminal emulator are OK and do not need any changes.
>>
>> Something like:
>>
>> screen section.
>> 01  scrPageHeader blank screen no-color-changes.
>>     02  value "Hello world - Screen section" line 2 column 1.
>>
>> Or something similar...
>>
>>
> 
> So what you're saying is that Cobol knows better than you what the screen 
> colors should be?
> 
> Got to wonder how that survived this long ...
> 

I have no idea how much this feature is used. Not needed if you have
and use FMS, DECforms, TDMS or some other similar form mgm tool.

We use one tool today that was a customer unique tool from DEC Sweden
(the manual has both RSX and VMS sections), but it doesn't support
132 char screens. We do have the Fortran source, but instead of trying
to patch that tool, we look at the "screen section" in Cobol.

It is acually really neat, the only issue right now is the default
colour handling done by the compiler.

On can work around it by not defining a "screen section" and instead
add the row/col options to each DISPLAY statement, but more work
and not as clean in the actual code...