Question

Every COBOL program I've browsed professionally has had Paragraph numbers. It is somewhat of Programmer Preference/Art within some general guidelines established by the organization. Reference the references based on your searches, and provide:

1) What you think are the purposes & advantages of numbering paragraphs.

2) Guidelines you suggest for numbering paragraphs.

Please do not cut/paste website text. I've already read that, and that is really the only wrong answer here. The idea of the assignment is assimilate, ascertain & express in simple terms the purpose, advantage & guidelines you'd suggest. This is not a novel; use brief paragraphs and or bullet points.

Lincoln was asked to appear upon some important occasion and deliver a five-minute speech, he said that he had no time to prepare five-minute speeches, but that he could go and speak an hour at any time. The point here, is that with a little planning, it does not take a lot of words to express your point.

i understand this is COBOL but i still need help there is no selection for cobol programming

Answer 1

Yes paragraph Numbers are very helpful as I myself work as a mainframe developer and I face lots of situations like that

I feel main purpose is for easy readability of the code.Like in our system first date is read from parm card so we use V000- (section name) for accepting date from Jcl and we use number V100- for checking whether the value is ok or not .

Then we use para as P000- for proofing of input variables from jcl or main program and H000 is used for performing different operations like suppose we have 1 cursor operation,1 update and 1 insert .We use H100- for cursor operation,h200- for insert

Vice versa.For Db2 operation and movement of fetched data we use D000- or update or insert.

So,the conclusion is that different section names and numbering helps you to understand the code better though being coded by someone else and logic designing also becomes easy and it saves lot of time and in IT industry time is money.

According to me the guidelines for para should be like:-

1.First para for validation

2.Second para for calling operations to be performed

3.Operation Para

4.Closing the program para

You can use any numbers but it should be logical as your code can be viewed by other programmer and he wouldnt understand this .It should be like H000- for para 1 and if any operation to be done after it you use h100- and so on.