Lab 5 Question about cobol-programming-course HOT 3 CLOSED

Ah...Totally missed the period sign. That's exactly what I needed to know. Thanks!

from cobol-programming-course.

@pineconeman09 - My advice, get rid of ALL unnecessary periods. They are just not necessary any more. And, more good advice for those starting out:

1. There should only be 2 periods per paragraph, 1 at the end of the paragraph name, and 1 on a blank line of its own at the end of the paragraph.
2. Always use GOBACK instead of STOP-RUN.
3. No need to use PERFORM THRU or EXIT paragraphs.
4. No need to use GOTOs. Use an IF statement and CONTINUE to check the (88-level) value of LASTREC to conditionally execute the PERFORM. Or, since you will only use 1 period within a paragraph, NEXT SENTENCE will take you to the end of the paragraph.
5. A READ or WRITE paragraph should be limited to just a READ of a file or WRITE of a record. Optionally, one group MOVE statement. The purpose of this type of paragraph is to be versatile enough to be able to perform it multiple times from different parts/areas of your program.
6. Never use NOT or only in very obvious, simple usage.

from cobol-programming-course.

Explicit means being verbose about something. Implicit means omitting something because that something is expected or obvious.

If you notice, there is an implicit termination

       IS-STATE-VIRGINIA.
           IF USA-STATE = 'Virginia' THEN
              ADD 1 TO VIRGINIA-CLIENTS. <---- here, the period
           END-IF.

But, the compiler doesn't know what you want to achieve. For the compiler the implicit termination is enough, so it complains that the it END-IF is not necessary.

There are two ways of resolving that compiler error:

1. You decide to use the implicit terminator (period is a sentence terminator that implicitly terminates IF)
2. You decide to use the explicit terminator (END-IF, so you should remove the period at the end of previous line). END-IF is an explicit terminator, but it is only valid with a period END-IF.

from cobol-programming-course.