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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: coroutines in COBOL, Article on new mainframe use
Date: Sun, 18 Aug 2024 01:58:06 -0000 (UTC)
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According to Keith Thompson  <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com>:
>> Really?? You’re not talking about that “ALTER ... TO PROCEED TO ...” crap, 
>> are you?
>
>A Google search for "cobol coroutines" would have saved you some time
>and embarrassment.

That finds some cool hacks but what I had in mind was the COBOL report writer.

You describe the layout of the report with page headings and control breaks and group
headings and totals. Then in your main program every time you do a GENERATE statement it
switches to the report writer, does whatever headers or footers or totals or whatever,
then returns to the main program keeping the state of the report until the next GENERATE.
INITIATE and TERMINATE start end end the report.

The reort writer got a bad rap from people who didn't understand it but if you want
to produce the kinds of reports it can do, it's quite nice.

I see that recent versions of IBM COBOL no longer include it, but they offer a
preprocessor that turns your report code into ordinary COBOL so other than changes to the
compiler control cards, it works the same.

See https://publibfp.dhe.ibm.com/epubs/pdf/c2643014.pdf


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