field change

[666satan]

hi guys, i have a small doubt can we increase the size of a field say i wa nt to increase the size of account no is of 6 bytes to 8bytes in both fixed length records and also variable length records,

 

[666satan]

its ok jack, jack tell me some website where i can get the clear notes of cobol , i need everything abt cobol, how shud i develop my programming skills ,plzzz guide me, i want to know abt fujitsu cobol, its cobol with asp.net right?....tell em what how many types of cobols we have...

 

[webrabbit]

The best COBOL learning tool I know of is "Teach Yourself COBOL in 21 Days" by Budlong published by SAMS Publishing. It comes with an old DOS-based COBOL development system that works fine under Windows XP, just doesn't support Windows functions. I believe the CD even has sample code.

 

[666satan]

hey jack , i have interview in .net with cobol that is fujitsu cobol....can u guide me?

 

[webrabbit]

Fujitso COBOL runs on PCs under Windows, perhaps Linix too. I have a copy that's a little over a year old. I would attach it but its almost half a gig. You can download it from their websid. It includes training videos.

 

[666satan]

thanks jack, whats the url of the site, plzz post it.........is there any difference between cobol2 and fujitsu cobol....is vb.net is used in fujitsu cobol....is there any difference in programming perspective

 

[tcsbiz]

Satan,

Are you really going to interview for a COBOL job without knowing anything about COBOL? That is a huge task. You will have to learn from the ground up. The book webrabbit suggested, "Teach Yourself COBOL in 21 Days", would be a good place to start but you may not be conversant enough in COBOL for an interview.

I would suggest taking a COBOL course at a technical school, too.

Here's a link to COBOL site with many links on it. it's a COBOL user's group and it may help you.

http://www.cobug.com/

You have a long road ahead of you. Good luck.

 

[666satan]

Thanks Jack, Im good in Vs Cobol2 , but i have never worked with fujitsu cobol.....and the company in which i have interview next week, they are looking guys who r good in cobol and they will put us in a project where we need to work in fujitsu cobol.....i will have a client round some time next week ....the interview will be on little bit in ASP.NET, COBOL and in dtatbases like db2, oracle.....i worked on db2, i have to brush up oracle,asp.net , and fujitsu cobol......yeah ur right very hard task ahead of me, what u suggest shud i go for this or continue with mainframes where i worked in for 3 yrs

 

[webrabbit]

COBOL2 just means the latest version. Includes lots of new verbs and such that make programming easier. Fujitsu COBOL is mostly compatible. Micro Focus .NET COBOL is 100% compatible but very expensive.

The COBOL I started with (in '68) didn't even have END-IF.

 

[mikrom]

I guess COBOL 2 or COBOL II means the COBOL 85 standard.

Both Compilers Micro Focus NetExpress with .NET and Fujitsu NetCOBOL for .NET are Object Oriented enhancements of COBOL, but the OOP enhancements are incompatible with each other.

I have no experience with no one of both, but IMHO using one of these for development is not without complications. You have to learn vendor specific OOP enhancements, how to work with classes and bbject references, vendor specific tricks, you have to solve vendor specific compiler issues.
The OOP enhancements are very verbosely and I doubt that you can do with one of these OO-COBOL compilers everything, what can be done with fully OOP languages such as Java or C#, and when, then this would require incomparably more programming effort as doing the same in Java or C#.

IMHO the better choice is rather to learn OOP with Java or C# then with OO-COBOL.

 

[666satan]

thanks jack for ur sugestions,,,

 

[666satan]

thnks mikrom for ur suugestions, but what is IMHO......? tell me in detail

 

[mikrom]

IMHO

 

[666satan]

oops "imho".........i got it

 

[666satan]

hey jack wassup...........whatz new in cobol?

 

[webrabbit]

New since when? COBOL has been updated many times since it was invented in the 50's.