CobolTutorials

Cobol Tutorials

1. The Zing COBOL
   The aim of the ZingCOBOL is to give the basics of the COBOL programming language for anyone who knows a little bit about computers (not much) and preferably will at least have come across another procedural progamming language such as C, BASIC or Pascal. If you want to learn good structured programming then, although the basic COBOL syntax is provided here, other sources can provide more effective guidance (for example, see The Kasten COBOL Page). 
     
2. Cobol Tutorial
   To provide a brief introduction to the programming language COBOL. To provide a context in which its uses might be understood. To introduce the Metalanguage used to describe syntactic elements of the language. To provide an introduction to the major structures present in a COBOL program.COBOL is a high-level programming language first developed by the CODASYL Committee (Conference on Data Systems Languages) in 1960. Since then, responsibility for developing new COBOL standards has been assumed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
     
3. Declaring Data in Cobol
   The aim of this unit is give you an understanding of the different categories of data used in a COBOL program and to demonstrate how items of each category may be created and used. A data-name or identifier is the name used to identify the area of memory reserved for a variable. A variable is a named location in memory into which a program can put data, and from which it can retrieve data. In addition to the data-name, a variable declaration also defines the type of data to be stored in the variable. This is known as the variable's data type.
     
4. Basic Procedure division Command
   The PROCEDURE DIVISION contains the code used to manipulate the data described in the DATA DIVISION. This tutorial examines some of the basic COBOL commands used in the PROCEDURE DIVISION. In the course of this tutorial you will examine how assignment is done in COBOL, how the date and time can be obtained from the computer and how arithmetic statements are written. In COBOL, the ACCEPT and DISPLAY verbs are used to read from the keyboard and write to the screen. Input and output using these commands is somewhat primitive because they were originally designed to be used in a batch programming environment to communicate with the computer operator.
      

5. Cobol Selection Constructs
   In most procedural languages, If and Case/Switch are the only selection constructs supported. COBOL supports advanced versions of both of these constructs, but it also introduces the concept of Condition Names - a kind of abstract condition. In this tutorial we will examine COBOL's selection constructs, the IF and the EVALUATE and we will demonstrate how to create and use Condition Names.
   When a program runs the program statements are executed one after another in sequence unless a statement is encountered that alters the order of Execution.
     

6. Introduction to Sequential file
   Files are repositories of data that reside on backing storage (hard disk, magnetic tape or CD-ROM). Nowadays, files are used to store a variety of different types of information, such as programs, documents, spreadsheets, videos, sounds, pictures and record-based data. 
   Although COBOL can be used to process these other kinds of data file, it is generally used only to process record-based files. In this, and subsequent file-oriented tutorials, we examine how COBOL may be used to process record-based files.
     

7. Processing Sequential file
   The records in a Sequential file are organized serially, one after another, but the records in the file may be ordered or unordered. The serial organization of the file and whether the file is ordered or unordered has a significant baring on how we process the records in the file and what kind of processing we can do.This tutorial examines the consequences of ordering and organization and reviews some techniques for processing Sequential files.
     

8. Cobol Interation Constructs
   In almost every programming job, there is some task that needs to be done over and over again. For example: The job of processing a file of records is an iteration of the task - get and process record. The job of getting the sum of a stream of numbers is an iteration of the task - get and add number. These jobs are accomplished using iteration constructs. Other computer languages support a variety of looping constructs, including Repeat, While, and For loops. Although COBOL has a set of looping constructs that is just as rich as other languages - richer in some cases - it only has one iteration verb. In COBOL, all iteration is handled by the PERFORM verb.
       

9. Tutorials  For fujitsu Cobol
   These tutorials provide step by step instructions on how to use Fujitsu COBOL V3. It is recommend that any new users to Fujitsu COBOL V3 follow these tutorials as an introduction to Fujitsu COBOL. Each of the exercises corresponds to sections in the book. The book is not required to use these exercises.If you have chosen to use Fujitsu COBOL V3 Starter Set, this set of exercises should help you to install the product, download the data files to use with the book, and use the basic tools. Fujitsu COBOL V3 Starter Set is a powerful set of COBOL tools and should enable you to do everything included in the book. 
     

10. Cobol Lectures and Tutorial
    These pages contain the COBOL programming lectures and tutorials for CS4312 - Software Engineering 2. For COBOL programming exercises, COBOL example programs, links to other COBOL sites or information about the Year2000 problem please connect to the main COBOL page. The COBOL programming lectures presented in the are delivered using Microsoft PowerPoint slides (Powerpoint 95 i.e. v7.0). There are three ways to view these slides. 
    Come to the lectures 
    View the slides online using the Microsoft PowerPoint Plug-In ( you'll need Internet Explorer 3.0 or Netscape 2.0 for this). 
    Download the ZIP file containing the slides and view it with either the PowerPoint Viewer or PowerPoint itself. 
      

11. Object Oriented Cobol
    A class definition is similar to an ordinary program. It has the usual four divisions, but with various special features.  In particular, the PROCEDURE DIVISION doesn't contain procedural code in the usual way. Rather, it contains all of the code for all of the methods of the class. Each method definition has four divisions of its own, and its PROCEDURE DIVISION contains the procedural code. Because of this arrangement, it isn't possible to define some methods in one source file and others in another. All method definitions for a class must reside in the same source file. A class with many complex methods may require an unusually large source file. 
      

12. The Cobol Programming Tutorial
    COBOL is a high level programming language of the procedural type. That is, it is not a functional, logic-oriented or object-oriented language. It is used primarily in the implementation phase of software development, like most programming languages. Sometimes, though, low-level designs are written in a COBOL-like pseudo code. A COBOL programmer writes a program using keyboard entry of text, because the most common human to computer medium at the time of its invention was the punch card. The name COBOL is an acronym that expands to Common Business Oriented Language. It was designed to be used in business applications. Today, we would say Information Systems. It continues to be most commonly used in Information Systems applications.