COBOL Level 1: Fundamentals

Course Overview

Many organisations run a significant part of their business using COBOL on mainframes and have no plans to change these working legacy systems. This is a well paced, practical course for those wishing to understand and use fundamental COBOL verbs to develop programs, from the simple to the reasonably complex, using ANSI-85 COBOL as standard.

The course covers the main areas of program structure, file handling and table handling, also giving detailed coverage of data types and storage. Instruction is reasonably intensive, but well balanced with substantial practical exercises. Delegates will find the course demanding, enjoyable and stimulating.

Audience

Those who need to gain a firm grounding in the COBOL. Language.

Skills Gained

• code, compile and debug COBOL programs
• understand the COBOL language conventions
• define external and internal data
• process files
• manage the flow of the program
• manipulate data
• perform arithmetic and conditional operations
• process tables using subscripts
• call subprograms

Prerequisites

Delegates should have previus programming experience or have attended the Introduction to Programming and Structured Programming courses.

Course Outline

Introduction to COBOL

• Development of COBOL
• COBOL in the IT Industry
• Divisions of COBOL
• COBOL layout
• COBOL character set
• Sample COBOL program notes
• Development environment for practical exercises

COBOL Language Conventions

• COBOL Syntax notation
• Naming conventions and rules
• Data storage

The Four Divisions

• The Identification division
• The Environment division
• The data division
• The hierarchy of the COBOL program

File Definition

• Types of file organization
• Types of file access modes
• Defining files in the environment division
• Defining files examples
• Defining data

Processing Files

• File processing
• Opening and closing files
• Input statements
• Output statements
• Processing printer files
• Low volume input and output

Program Control

• Program design
• The PERFORM statement!

Working-Storage

The working-storage section

Data Manipulation

• The MOVE statement
• The SET statement
• The INITIALIZE statement

Conditional Expressions

• Conditional expressions
• The EVALUATE statement!

Arithmetic Statements

• Arithmetic verbs
• Fields of arithmetic!

Tables

• One-dimensional table example
• Defining tables
• Subscripts
• PERFORM VARYING STATEMENT
• Alternative methods of processing table loops
• Two-dimensional table example
• Two-dimensional tables
• Three Dimensional tables
• Variable length tables

Calling and Called Programs

• Calling programs
• The call statement
• The called program
• Exiting the called program