Talk:SYCPOL

Another idea would be to fix it so that it will work even if the cards are placed in the wrong order. Such as, the division and/or section, and what it belongs to, must be mentioned on each card if applicable (a PROCEDURE CODE SECTION, or any other section inside of a procedure definition, needs the procedure name somewhere above it on the same card; MAIN PROCEDURE or PROCEDURE CODE SECTION or STORAGE DIVISION or whatever needs to be respecified at the top of each card if it is longer than a single card; an EXTERNAL PROCEDURE declaration needs to specify the MODULE NAME and IDENTIFIER on the same card; etc). PROGRAM CODE DIVISION can be made optional to specify if it starts at the top of a card. Spacing and indentation rules should be corrected in order that an entire statement can therefore fit into one card (some things (mainly declarations) do not need to be changed and can be made strict in their exact spacing; other things can be made less strict, so that line breaks can be allowed anywhere inside of a statement although at least one space is required at the beginning of a line which doesn't start a statement, and other lines don't start with spaces unless they are blank). There are already line numbers, so that already helps to know the proper ordering. Such things as I mentioned can be considered as extensions, so that the standard SYCPOL can still be used and an extended implementation is still fully compatible with loading standard programs. --Zzo38 (talk) 08:52, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

Good ideas. I think that would require a new MODULE-declaration to distinguish modules. A minimal hello world would be:

PROGRAM CARD STANDARD SYSTEM CARD I @HELLO MODULE DOCUMENTATION DIVISION IDENTIFIER STRING 8 "HELLO" IMPORTS DIVISION !PS EXTERNAL PROCEDURE IDENTIFIER STRING 16 "PRINT TO STREAM" MODULE NAME STRING 8 "STDIO"

PROGRAM CARD STANDARD SYSTEM CARD I @HELLO MODULE INPUT OUTPUT DIVISION OPEN STANDARD OUTPUT CLOSE STANDARD INPUT .OUT OUTPUT STREAM OUTS STANDARD OUTPUT STORAGE DIVISION .HELLO STRING 8 "HELLO" .WORLD STRING 8 "WORLD"

PROGRAM CARD STANDARD SYSTEM CARD I @HELLO MODULE MAIN PROCEDURE (1) PROCEED TO !PS WITH .HELLO .OUT (2) PROCEED TO !PS WITH .WORLD .OUT (3) RETURN WITH SUCCESS

I think those cards may be in any order. – GermanyBoy (talk) 13:31, 29 June 2014 (UTC)