A fellow named Frank Paternitti (won't swear to that spelling) who was/is a principle in a Cleveland consulting firm (DPAI: DeCarlo, Paternitti and Assoc) wrote a preprocessor for the COBOL compiler on the 3000 long ago.  Their ERP package (IBS/3000) used so many macros and copylibs the standard compiler couldn't handle them.   If you can track him down, he may have some thoughts to share.

Terry W. Simpkins
office: +1 757-766-4278
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-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Robert W. Mills
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2012 9:54 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [HP3000-L] COBOL Preprocessor

Greetings to the -L,

I am looking for information on how the COBOL Preprocessor internally handles the $DEFINE and $PREPROCESSOR commands.

During my time with the 3000 I used macros a lot. After 4 years without them on OpenCOBOL & MicroFocus I decided to write my own preprocessor.

The current version runs a bit slow (has to make 2 passes of the source file and uses an indexed work file) and can not handle nested macros but I'm still working on it.

regards,
Robert W.Mills

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