Cobol for the 21st century / Nancy Stern, Robert A. Stern and James P. Ley

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Unit I The Basics 1 An Introduction to Structured Program Design in COBOL 2 2 The IDENTIFICATION and ENVIRONMENT DIVISIONs 40 3 The DATA DIVISION 62 4 Coding Complete COBOL Programs: The PROCEDURE DIVISION 104 Unit II Designing Structured Programs 5 Designing and Debugging Batch and Interactive COBOL Programs 138 6 Moving Data, Printing Information, and Displaying Output Interactively 184 7 Computing in COBOL: The Arithmetic Verbs and Intrinsic Functions 259 8 Decision Making Using the IF and EVALUATE Statements 302 9 Iteration: Beyond the Basic PERFORM 344 Unit III Writing High-Level COBOL Programs 10 Control Break Processing 386 11 Data Validation 435 12 Array Processing and Table Handling 472 Unit IV File Maintenance 13 Sequential File Processing 562 14 Sorting and Merging 617 15 Indexed and Relative File Processing 645 Unit V Advanced Topics 16 Improving Program Productivity Using the COPY, CALL, and Other Statements 712 17 The Report Writer Module 737 Appendixes A COBOL Character Set and Reserved Words A-2 B Differences Among the COBOL Standards A-7 C Glossary A-11 Index I-1

As the authors were researching material on the COBOL standard, they realized that the planned COBOL 2008 standard (discussed in the 11th edition) did not in fact occur. Some of the items marked as COBOL 2008 in the 11th edition had in fact changed in 2002, and some marked as COBOL 2008 will now finally be changed in the upcoming proposed COBOL 2013 standard. Therefore, in the Update Edition, we have changed the icons to indicate COBOL 2002 changes and the upcoming proposed COBOL 2013 changes.