Abstract
Like many IT professionals of my generation, I began programming with COBOL on mainframes. One thing that I always found odd about COBOL was its incredibly relaxed rules on datatypes (especially after having the importance of structured data typing beaten into me through the long years of university education). When processing a file with COBOL, a sequence of bytes read from a file could be treated as a character string, a date, a number, even binary data—as long as I could overlay the bytes successfully into a working storage definition then the COBOL compiler was happy.
Keywords
Type Attribute Object Type Exception Handler Database Table Package Body
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information
© Connor McDonald, with Chaim Katz, Christopher Beck, Joel R. Kallman, and David C. Knox 2004