cobol productivity tool

[otto1939]

Hi there:

I am a retired mainframe Cobol and Assembler programmer. In the late 80's and 90's I had to do maintenance for a banking system with several 1000 Cobol programs. Most of the code I had never seen before or could not remember when I had to look at it. There were no productivity tools.

Over the years I wrote a Cobol pre-compiler (in Assembler) that would add Cobol source code to each If-statement which would make the programm print the If-statements with the values in the referenced fields. This made it possible to trace vast amounts of code without worrying about looking at code that really was not executed. My 'Cobtrac' precompiler could process source code selectively by program module, paragraph, specific if-statements or when a field had a certain content (like an account number).

Needless to say, this made my life much easier and I could identify code problems much faster; also after I made changes to the code I could prove that it was working.

I am out of touch with what is available today, but some times I wonder whether this Cobtrac program would still be useful today.

Any comments are appreciated.

 

[COBOLKenny]

Computer Associates has a product that is called Xpediter that seems to do what you were. You compile your program with the Xpediter active and it puts some 'hooks' into your program.

When you execute, you start by setting breakpoints, or lines that you want to stop at and check things out. You can execute until you get to that point and then if you wish, you can step thru the statements one at a time. You can take a look at what is in data fields at any time. And can even change the values of the fields. For example, you can stop at the statement before a S0C7 happens, check out the data value, change it to a numeric and continue running.

 

[otto1939]

Thank you Kenny:

I was aware of Expediter and Intertest. During the early versions these tools had problems (like you were 15 modules nested and something would happen that you could not get past). My program was a poor man's Expediter, quick and dirty, without all the overhead (and expense). You could look at the trace listing, make it shorter as the debugging progressed and be done before others had got Expediter to work.

As I was suspecting some of these tools are probably better today.

 

[3gm]

We use ASG Smarttest on the mainframe. Seems to work well and doesn't impose too many demands on my staff.

Of course, the PC platform COBOLs all seem to have nice GUI debuggers that do an excellent job. Most of these vendors can handle mainframe stuff on the PC too, so you really can write, test, and debug mainframe code on the PC platform in many situations.

Regards,

Glenn