COBOL Programming

Overview

This course covers the major components of the COBOL for OS/390 and VSE/ESA languages which use IBM''''s Language Environment (LE) platform. Many practical sessions are used to consolidate the teaching.
Course objectives

The objectives are to give a grounding in using the COBOL language in a mainframe environment.
By the end of this course you will have learned

• How to write COBOL programs using standard programming constructs
• How to write modular programs and use standard linkage
• How to read and write sequential and VSAM files
• How to debug simple dumps

Who should attend

The course is aimed at OS/390 or VSE trainee programmers and those who require cross training in the language.
Pre-requisites
An understanding of program design methodology. Experience of a mainframe editor.
Synopsis

• 
  An introduction to COBOL- Basic structure of the language; Identification Division; Environment Division; Data Division; Procedure Division; Syntactical rules; Data description
• 
  Data Description- Pictures; Usage; Levels; Working- Storage section; Input-output section; Linkage section
• 
  File description- Select statement; FD statement
• 
  Processing- MOVE statement ; Conditional statements - IF and EVALUATE; Arithmetic statements - ADD, SUBSTRACT, MULTIPLY, DIVIDE, COMPUTE; PERFORM subroutines; array processing using subscripts, indexes PERFORM VARYING; INSPECT
• 
  I/O Handling for Sequential Files- OPEN/CLOSE; READ/WRITE
• 
  VSAM Files- KSDS/ESDSRRDS file processing; Primary/Alternate keys; Utilities
• 
  Program Execution- Modularisation and CALL; Compile and link-edit; Execution of the program; Basic debugging