Sams Teach Yourself COBOL in 24 Hours

Hour 22Other Intrinsic Functions

In Hour 21, “Date Manipulation,” you learned about the Intrinsic Functions associated with date processing. In addition to these functions, COBOL comes equipped with a wealth of additional Intrinsic Functions that fill the need for a variety of items such as

• Mathematical and statistical Functions

• Financial application Functions

• String manipulation Functions

• Miscellaneous Functions such as random number generation

These functions bring features to COBOL that, prior to their introduction in 1989, had to be designed and coded by programmers, sometimes using complex algorithms. Many of these functions can help make programming much easier for the COBOL programmer.

Mathematical Functions

The first subset ...