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I debugged many a COBOL pragram by running down the stack. In fact, I wrote a COBOL debugger for Sperry/Univac 1100's running HVTIP transactions.
by infradig 8y ago
I debugged many a COBOL pragram by running down the stack. In fact, I wrote a COBOL debugger for Sperry/Univac 1100's running HVTIP transactions.
- kimi 8y agoMaybe I remember incorrectly, or they just did not use it because it was a different revision/standard. Obviously COBOL today has everything (there must be reactive COBOL somewhere).
- Someone 8y agoClassic COBOL needs a stack (or something equivalent. A popular choice was to store return addresses of calls near function entry points, distributing the stack through memory) to support the case where a single subroutine is called from more than one place in the program (most, if not all, programs will have those, if only to do I/O) What it doesn’t need (and didn’t support) is recursion, and without recursion, the maximum depth of the stack can be computed at compile time, so that a program can refuse to run if there isn’t sufficient room for a stack that size. (The first FORTRAN’s were similar in this respect. If you wanted your program to support larger arrays, you recompiled it)