6 ms·
> you have to find a little tiny period to find where execution resumes. No labels, just a tiny couple of pixel round period. Totally naive to COBOL here, why
by icxa 7y ago
> you have to find a little tiny period to find where execution resumes. No labels, just a tiny couple of pixel round period.
Totally naive to COBOL here, why do you have to do it? You said you wrote some regexes for the pull and transform, why not pipe the source to a program that finds that period for you?
- nexuist 7y agoI don't think it would have been a hassle for him specifically (could always just ctrl/cmd + f....), he's moreso lamenting the fact that this is an actual feature i.e., if you actually wanted to program in COBOL for some reason you'd actually have to deal with this, which makes its inclusion insane.
- hermitdev 7y agoYeah, it wasn't an issue of doing CTRL-F, it was about making sense of that flow when the control jumps you multiple screens of code. The problem isn't finding the destination, its what alternately happened been source and destination. Also, if your reading on paper, CTRL-F isn't available. You're scanning those pages by hand. When you're sitting there, highlighter and pen in hand to make annotations and point out important shit, its a problem. End up with circles around the periods and arrows point to it with comments like "this is how we got to x from y." Edit: also if you end up at the same place regardless of the source or from multiple sources. You can't keep the code for a level to find everywhere a jump emds up there.
- golergka 7y agoOr even a simple script that would convert source code from all-caps to the usual normal-language sentences and then back.
- dmurray 7y agoLike a different font?
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y agoLike "sentence".capitalize() In Python.
- hermitdev 7y agoIn 2003, when I went through this headache, I wasn't even aware of Python. Might have barely made 2.0 at that time.
- BjoernKW 7y agoCOBOL programs reside on mainframe computers, an environment that's entirely alien to someone who's used to UNIX-like environments where you have something like a pipe. I'm not sure how and on which machines COBOL code is written and compiled these days but I reckon that piping it to grep, or similar tools, might simply not be an option on those machines.
- lboc 7y agoFYI on IBM mainframes, MVS has included an integrated Unix environment since 1993 [0]. This continues to be developed and supplied with the latest versions of z/OS :) Here's someone asking about doing just that: https://serverfault.com/questions/356574/can-i-run-grep-against-a-zos-dataset-via-unix-system-services https://serverfault.com/questions/356574/can-i-run-grep-agai... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MVS#MVS/XA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MVS#MVS/XA (Edited to go back even further than OS/390)
- pulse7 7y agoToday they write/edit COBOL programs in IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer (today named IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software) which is a commercial version of Eclipse with several mainframe related plugins. So they use usual Eclipse editors with remotely located files and they can find these periods without grep - just with CTRL+F...
- drabiega 7y agoMy experience was that while the IDE was available and picked up by newer developers, the majority of developers at the mainframe shop where I worked avoided it as much as possible for pretty much the same reasons seasoned UNIX devs prefer working via command line and text editor.
- tyingq 7y agoA pretty good account of a "new to mainframes" person figuring out how to make their first Cobol program on z/OS: https://medium.com/@bellmar/hello-world-on-z-os-a0ef31c1e87f https://medium.com/@bellmar/hello-world-on-z-os-a0ef31c1e87f