Re: [open-cobol-list] TABLES and TEXT

[Brian Tiffin]

On Thu, 21 Feb 2013 14:03:28 -0500, Robert Wolfe  
<address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi all!
>
> New to COBOL and trying to learn it by looking at online resources plus  
> working with my housemate, who does RPG and COBOL programming on the  
> iSeries platform.
>
> I am working on a small program that uses tables and when I go to run  
> the cobc -x command to compile the code, I get the following errors:
>
> address@hidden:~/cobol$ cobc -x tables.cob
> tables.cob:4: Error: 'table' reserved word, but not supported yet
> tables.cob:30: Error: 'text' reserved word, but not supported yet
> tables.cob:19: Error: Level 01 item 'result' cannot have OCCURS clause
> tables.cob:27: Error: Level 01 item 'res-text' cannot have OCCURS clause
> tables.cob: In section 'main':
> tables.cob:51: Error: 'text' reserved word, but not supported yet

Welcome to OpenCOBOL Robert.  Change the variable names 'table' to  
something like a-table, text to some-text, and then move the OCCURS down  
one grouping level.  Heady stuff for beginning, but it'll all make sense  
soon.

Looking at the line numbers, I'm guessing you have PROGRAM-ID. table.   
Change that name to tableing or some such.

COBOL is a reserved word rich language, and COBOL developers soon learn to  
avoid variable names that have ANY similarity to english, as the next  
Draft standard could well use them as reserved words.  For a list of  
avoidable names, see cobc --list-reserved (and any other --list-xxx args  
that cobc --help shows.  --list-intrinsics etc.

OpenCOBOL, being tightly bound with C, means it is also a good idea to  
avoid C keywords as well, so no

PROGRAM-ID. int.

as that would be asking for grief of unknown quantities and qualities.

On the OCCURS.  Set up the structure as

01 result-table.
   05 result-items PIC x(10) occurs 10 times.

There are configuration options to allow 01 level occurs, but it isn't the  
standard way of doing things, and access to the elements of result-items  
is the same in the procedure division source anyway.   result-item(3)  
would implicitly know it's part of the result-table group.

In default.conf (under /usr/share/open-cobol or  
/usr/local/share/open-cobol for GNU/Linux) there is

top-level-occurs-clause:            skip

but I never play with that one, so can't speak to the facts and not overly  
sure what happens when set to

top-level-occurs-clause:            ok

Feel free to ask more, but if you do and the source code isn't secret,  
post it along with the questions and you'll get more detailed responses.

> If it helps any, 'cobc --version' returns the following information:
>
> address@hidden:~/cobol$ cobc --version
> cobc (OpenCOBOL) 1.1.0
> Copyright (C) 2001-2009 Keisuke Nishida / Roger While
> Built    Feb 21 2013 10:50:17
> Packaged Feb 06 2009 10:30:55 CET
>
> Thanks for any insight anyone can give this newbie.

Cheers,
Brian