Subj : Cobol/gnucobol
To : DARKNETGIRL
From : Dumas Walker
Date : Tue Jun 03 2025 09:44 am
> > I coded on iSeries professionally.
> That's amazing! Many years ago, second half of 90s, I was at the
> AS/400 support center. Unfortunately I probably wasn't savvy enough
> to learn COBOL on AS/400. it felt so difficult back then.
> I think I have a book on COBOL on AS/400 in the garage that I have to
> get back to life. I was much enjoying networking.
In the mid-90s I was an operator on a Baby 36 and, sometimes, an AS/400.
IIRC, our programmers used RPG. I learned a couple of things from them
that I have long since forgot. ;)
> Just to set the expectations, I'm writing a simple app to catalog some
> collectables. It has a single indexed file at the moment.
Once upon a time, I considered writing a program to do something like that
with my model railroad equipment. I eventually figured out that keeping it
all in spreadsheets with gnumeric was sufficient enough. ;)
When I was considering it, I was picturing it as one application ("COB
file") and not as something complex with many programs involved. Best to
keep it simple when you can!
> It wasn't what I meant, but you actually answered me in the example
> you provided.
> What I meant was something like:
> "(A)dd, (E)dit, (D)elete, (E)xit => _"
> In your example code was stored in the variable PROCESS-INDICATOR
Yes, that is what I was thinking of when I wrote that. ;)
> It was! But there's so much to learn.
> At the end, I just want to have a bit of fun.
You can.
One thing that some people have difficulty with when going from
another language to COBOL is that, although the code reads like English,
they are not used to needing to define all of their variables in working
storage. For some reason, that just seemed logical to me.
