Greetings,
One can do some very powerful things with macros. I have no argument
there. In fact, I now find myself in a world of macros and
preprocessors.
I said farewell to the beloved HP-3000 platform recently and moved to
the world of the IBM mainframe and the z/OS operating system. I knew it
was going to be frustrating, after the joy of using MPE, but one has to
move on.
I am learning JCL now. Today's topic was the DD command. What I
wouldn't give for the power and simplicity of the good old :FILE
command!
Walter
-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Jeff Kell
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2012 8:09 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] COBOL Preprocessor
On 9/18/2012 10:53 PM, Walter J. Murray wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> Exactly why I tried to discourage the use of macros in HP COBOL II.
> They are not standard COBOL, and do not work the same, or don't work
> at all, on other compilers. But nobody ever expects that they will be
> porting their COBOL.
Whew... moving to COBOL-II we lived on macros. Using predictable data
elements for Image items, sets, keys, status words, etc., we reduced
Image calls to simple macros with a minimum of parameters. Among other
macros...
Also had a custom preprocessor. We had several large, modular programs
with sequential source files containing various subprograms. The
preprocessor would track the filename, section, paragraph, last image
call, and generate standard error handling that would output a nice
"tombstone" identifying the point in the program where the error
occurred. It also handled terminal messages, warnings, and errors (you
could put the text you wanted displayed into COBOL comments below the
"macro" and it filled in code to generate a message catalog and calls to
display the text).
Ahh... been awhile since I had to recompile one of those puppies from
source... :) [Naturally a command file did most of the associated
preprocessing :) ]
Jeff
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