This course is designed to improve students' knowledge of COBOL. Each delegate will write, execute and debug COBOL programs which stress the advanced features of the language. This will include multi-dimensional and variable length tables, sub-program calls and VSAM file manipulation. Programming standards and style will be addressed throughout.

Application programmers with some experience in COBOL who require formal training in the advanced language features and programming techniques in the IBM z/OS COBOL environment.

Attending our COBOL Programming Part 1 course, or an equivalent level of knowledge, is assumed.

Procedure Division

WRITE statement (printing).

Data Division

Edited Data.

Alphanumeric Edited.

Numeric Edited.

Simple Insertion.

Special Insertion.

Fixed Insertion.

Floating Insertion.

Suppression and Replacement.

Program Control

PERFORM with VARYING.

Table Handling

Table Access (Subscripting and Indexing).

Lookup Tables.

OCCURS clause.

Variable Length Tables.

Multi-Dimensional Tables.

SET statement.

SEARCH statement.

PARM in JCL and its effect upon COBOL

Subprogram Linkage

Subprograms.

Use of static and dynamic calls.

CALL statement.

CANCEL statement.

Coding a subprogram.

ENTRY statement.

GOBACK statement.

EXIT PROGRAM statement.

Data Manipulation

INITIALIZE statement.

INSPECT statement.

STRING statement.

UNSTRING statement.

Reference Modification.

VSAM File Processing

ESDS, KSDS and RRDS VSAM files.

OPEN statement.

START statement.

READ statement.

WRITE statement.

REWRITE statement.

DELETE statement.

CLOSE statement.

COPY statement.

RETURN-CODE and System Codes

Intrinsic Functions

Character-based intrinsic functions.

Arithmetic intrinsic functions.

Date/Time related intrinsic functions.