Frequently Asked Questions

For COBOL Programming (CS 210)

Last updated 1/15/04

1. Can I revise any program at any time? Yes. This is the reasoning for the portfolio approach that works well in the College Writing Seminar course. You have the chance to revise and correct a program and when you learn new techniques you can revise an earlier program to take advantage of the technique. No program receives a final grade. It will be the entire final portfolio and your reflection paper that determines the grade, not the programs along the way. Oh, BTW, late submissions will count against your grade.
2. For the week1 COBOL program, how important is the formatting of the output file? I have the output working (it writes to a file) but the formatting has been tough to nail down. For example, instead of everything being neatly ordered on each line, I just get big gaps and such, making the output a little ugly. Is this a big deal or is it enough to just get it working? One of the things you also need to understand about cobol and its environment is that much of the input and output are data files. Unless you are instructed otherwise, you must adhere to the column specifications as given in the assignments for input and output, and not adjust the output just to make it pretty. For input you may need to pad leading zeros and add extra spaces to strings of varying length to make everything line up. Later you will have assignments that meant to be printed for human consumption--and even then, the layout will be specified exactly.