March 2022
Intermediate to advanced
348 pages
8h 37m
English
Content preview from Modern Mainframe Development
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 7. Other Languages and Programming Techniques
We have focused on the COBOL language. This is definitely the standard for mainframe development. But a myriad of other languages are available. These include C++, C, Java, assembler language, PL/I, REXX, and CLIST.
You do not necessarily need to know all these languages, but having a general understanding of them is a good idea. This will be our focus in this chapter.
We’ll also look at some of the programming techniques to help speed up your development. For this, the focus will be on COBOL.
What Language to Use?
Despite the strong capabilities of COBOL, sometimes you really need to use another language. When making this decision, you should consider a variety of factors:
-
Is speed important?
-
What are the skills sets of the developer?
-
Does your employer have certain preferences?
-
Are there functions that are much more efficient in other languages?
It’s also important to have an understanding of the categories of computer languages. For example, most are high-level. This means that they use English-like statements and the structures are fairly straightforward. This is the case with COBOL.
A low-level language, on the other hand, is much closer to the machine and its capabilities. Because of this, the instructions and logic can be much more complex and tedious. The good news is that you will likely not need to use a low-level language. Still, this chapter provides an overview of one of them: assembler.
Older languages ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.