Frank Swarbrick

Hey Brian, You may have unknowingly read my mind. I was going to look at how the ALL subscript was implemented as a path to thinking about how my "implicit loop" construct (probably not the best name) idea might be implemented. Of course having read your reply there but not really understanding the limitation. How is it that a COBOL SEARCH is able to be implemented, but my loop idea is stopped by your aforementioned limitations?

Am I missing something or is the special "ALL" subscript for intrinsic functions not yet supported? If not, any particular reason why not?

I've been thinking about this lately. Shouldn't COBOL have a more "native" way to loop through all rows of a table? After all, it already has SEARCH as a way to find a particular row in a table, without an explicit loop at all. In the case of iterating all elements it would still be a loop, but one that expresses that fact more explicitly and leaves less room for error. I have a few ideas and I'd like to hear comments on them. Note that this is of course nothing you can't do with existing COBOL,...

I've been thinking about this lately. Shouldn't COBOL have a more "native" way to loop through all rows of a table? After all, it already has SEARCH as a way to find a particular row in a table, without an explicit loop at all. In the case of iterating all elements it would still be a loop, but one that expresses that fact more explicitly and leaves less room for error. I have a few ideas and I'd like to hear comments on them. Note that this is of course nothing you can't do with existing COBOL,...

This is sad. I had wondered why he'd not been around. :-(

For the PG, or perhaps elsewhere, I wonder if there could be references to items being standard vs. extension. Take STOP RUN for example. There are now three different ways one can set an operating system return code. One (RETURN-CODE) is an IBM extension. One (RETURNING/GIVING is another extension). Only STOP RUN [WITH] { ERROR / NORMAL } [STATUS] is part of any COBOL standard (2002/2014). How does one choose which one to use! By the way, STOP RUN ERROR works, but STOP RUN NORMAL does not compile:...

How does one make a decision on using BDB vs VBISAM?

Of interest to some, perhaps, you can use the Windows 10 "Bash on Ubuntu on Windows", a.k.a. the Windows Subsystem for Linux, to run open-cobol/GnuCOBOL. You can install oc 1.1 "directly" using (IIRC) "sudo apt install opencobol". If you download the GnuCOBOL source from here you can build it from source. (You need to install the necessary support libraries such as gcc, make, texinfo etc.; I'm sure they are all documented somewhere.) I did this with the base sourceforce gnucobol SVN repository and...