On Fri, 13 Mar 2020 19:45:00 -0400, Lew Pitcher wrote:

> On March 13, 2020 19:07, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 13 Mar 2020 16:41:25 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot
>>  declaimed the following:
>>
>>>On Fri, 13 Mar 2020 14:32:09 -0000 (UTC)
>>>Martin Gregorie  wrote:
>>>
>>>> Full-stops mean stuff to a COBOL compiler!
>>>
>>>The largest output per bad byte of source I've ever seen came from a
>>>COBOL compiler absorbing the consequences of a missing full stop (IIRC
>>>after the word DIVISION). It got very confused and went on about it at
>>>great length.
>>
>> In my college days, we had a student who'd fed her object file back
>> into the compiler... That generated a wad of error output...
>
> [quote]
>   You can generate a complete listing of compiler diagnostic messages
>   with their message numbers, severities, and text by compiling a
>   program that has program-name ERRMSG.
>
>   You can code just the PROGRAM-ID paragraph, as shown below, and omit
>   the rest of the program.
>
>   Identification Division.
>   Program-ID. ErrMsg.
> [/quote/
> https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SS6SG3_6.2.0/pg/tasks/
tpclr11.html

That's useful, but I suspect it is an IBM-specific feature because its
not mentioned in either of my COBOL books, which were published in 1983
"A COBOL Handbook (Christopher Russell) and 1985 "The Illustrated RM
COBOL Book" (Deborah Stone) and both describe ANSI 74 COBOL.

I see from the above IBM reference that mixed case (and all lower case?)
is now accepted in COBOL source code. When was that standardised. Asking
because I haven't written standards-compliant COBOL since 1984, apart
from a little distinctly non-standard Tandem S-COBOL.


--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05