Professional Training

Prerequisites

The course is suited to those students who are programmers, or those students who have had experience of programming. For those students not programmed before, have no concept of program design or are from a non-technical background, the 10-day Introduction to COBOL Programming course is recommended.

Audience

This course is intended for programmers who are new to the COBOL programming language and need to write and maintain programs, or programmers who are converting from another high-level language.

Course Objectives

On completion of this course, participants will be able to:

Make effective use of all main COBOL verbs and keywords.
Define and use internal and external data, correctly.
Use COBOL statements to process sequential files and non-sequential files.
Understand, create and process subscripted and indexed tables.
Use external subprograms.
Apply copy code to a program.
Use the FUNCTION keyword.
Write programs in a maintainable and efficient manner using structured code.
Test programs and, where necessary, debug them.

Introduction to COBOL

Development of COBOL.
Program translation: compilation, linkage editor.
Common compilation errors, compiler options.
Divisions of COBOL, COBOL syntax and format, COBOL character set, program source structure.

COBOL statement structure

COBOL words, format of statements.

Identification Division

Entries.

Environment Division

Entries.

Data Division

Entries.

File Section

File description (FD)
Record descriptions
Hierarchy and level numbers
Description-string entry

Working-Storage Section

Literals
Figurative constants
Redefines clause
Data representation
The Usage clause
Synchronisation
Sign clause

The Procedure Division

File status codes
File statements: Open, Read, Write, Close, Stop, Goback; Accept and Display
Move statement
Justified clause
Qualification of data names
Reference Modification.

Perform statement

Out-of-line, With test.....Until,.... Times, in-line statement
Go to statement.

Program design

Describes program design techniques, design considerations, procedure names, program structure.

Printing

Printed output
Write statement with the advancing option
Editing characters
Initialise statement.

Environment Division clauses

Other entries.

Condition testing

Conditional statements: IF statement, class condition, sign condition, relation condition, condition-name conditionals (level 88), Set statement for condition-names
Nested If statements
Compound conditions
Logical operator - OR with AND
Evaluate statement
Continue statement

Arithmetic

Arithmetic statements:
Rounded option
On Size Error option
Add statement
Subtract statement
Multiply statement
Divide statement
Compute statement

Non-sequential files

File access modes
Select for Indexed files
Select for Relative files