COBOL is one of the traditional mainframe languages. Powerful PC compilers have become available which have widened the audience and applicability of the language. This text addresses the changing needs of COBOL programmers to understand, use, and maintain the vast amount of COBOL code in existence. It provides complete coverage of COBOL with an emphasis on COBOL 85. It also covers object-oriented programming which has recently been applied to the language. Included are special icons to reference the features of the COBOL standard and topics of significant interest to PC users. The update includes a revised disk and a chapter on the "Year 2000 Problem". This chapter provides a full account of this problem, how it arose, and its relevance to the COBOL programming language. It also discusses what must be done to fix the problem and other issues that could have a profound impact on information processing in the 21st century.
Unit I The basics: An introduction to structure programme design in COBOL; the identification and environmental divisions; the data division; coding complete COBOL programmes - the procedure division. Unit II Designing structured programmes: Designing and debugging batch and interactive COBOL programmes; moving data, printing information and displaying output interactively; computing in COBOL - the arithmetic verbs and intrinsic functions; decision making using the IF and evaluate statements; iteration - beyond the basic perform. Unit III Writing high-level COBOL programmes: control break processing; data validation; array processing and table handling. Unit IV File maintenance: sequential file processing; sorting and merging; indexed and relative file processing. Unit V Advanced topics: improving programme performance using the COPYCALL and other statements; the report writer module; an introduction to Object-Oriented Programming; COBOL and the Year 2000 problem; appendices; COBOL character set and reserved words; data set for programming assignment 2 in each chapter; differences among the COBOL standards; COBOL for the AS/400.