> In message <87372ECCA42DD3118E3200508B2E1146C576B6@GGEXSF>, Tracy Pierce
><[log in to unmask]> writes
>>I have a recursive subpgm which must write to a file that's passed to it,
so
>>voila, EXTERNAL or GLOBAL seems to be the ticket.  I'm doing everything
just
>>like the example provided in the COBOL manual (p 11-7 & 11-8) EXCEPT that
my
>>subpgm resides in an XL, not in the same program file as its caller.

so per Ken Hirsh's suggestion, I added ;SHARE to each of ADDXL and LINK for
main & sub; voila it works...well, almost.  It works as long as the
recursion depth is < 2, but at the point at which the subpgm calls itself,
we die again when trying to write to the EXTERNAL file (FSERR 48 - file not
opened for sequential writes).

The practical solution seems to be write a separate subprogram to handle
writing the output (Thanks, Roy Brown!), but of course I'm trying to avoid
that; it seems that this EXTERNAL scheme SHOULD work.

Does anybody have EXTERNAL working to share an output file?  I wonder what's
missing now?

MAIN:
        open output EXTERN
        Write first EXTERN
        call sub
        SUB: write EXTERN
        SUB: call sub
        SUB:SUB: write EXTERN (fails).



Tracy Pierce





















>
> Hi Tracy
>
> Faced with the same issue, we take a different approach.
>
> We write a 'real' SUBPROGRAM (I hope your recursive subpgm is
> DYNAMIC!)
> to handle the file open, read/write and close, and CALL this, as
> required from the recursive subpgm.
>
> This gets round the restrictions that COBOL imposes on file
> handling in
> these circumstances.
>
> I don't know whether this is more or less neat, and/or more or less
> general, than a solution using EXTERNAL or GLOBAL though....
> --
> Roy Brown   Kelmscott Ltd
>
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