What will the exit do in cobol

venosol · New User Joined: 16 Nov 2006 Posts: 43 Location: Bangalore

What will the exit do?

Everyone says that exit will do nothing. Then what's use of that.

Suppose if use exit in Nested If loop. After encountering the exit satement the control comes out of the loop ?

Please clarify on this.

vicky10001 · Active User Joined: 13 Jul 2005 Posts: 136

The EXIT statement must be preceded by a paragraph-name and
must appear in a sentence by itself.

If an EXIT paragraph is specified as the last paragraph in a series of
performed paragraphs (i.e., PERFORM THRU), then it identifies the end
of the series of performed paragraphs. When control reaches an EXIT paragraph and such a PERFORM THRU is active, control is transferred
back to the statement following the PERFORM THRU.
When control reaches an EXIT paragraph that is not the end of a range
of paragraphs governed by an active PERFORM THRU, control passes
through the EXIT statement to the first statement of the following
paragraph.

The EXIT statement is also useful as an exit point for a single
performed paragraph, as shown below:
.
.
PERFORM 1000-CALCULATE-TOTALS THRU 1000-EXIT.
.
1000-CALCULATE-TOTALS.
ADD 1 TO TOTAL-NUMBER-EMPS.
IF EMP-SALARY LESS THAN 25000
GO TO 1000-EXIT.
ADD 1 TO EMPS-MAKING-25K-AND-UP.
IF EMP-SALARY LESS THAN 50000
GO TO 1000-EXIT.
ADD 1 TO EMPS-MAKING-50K-AND-UP.
IF EMP-SALARY LESS THAN 75000
GO TO 1000-EXIT.
ADD 1 TO EMPS-MAKING-75K-AND-UP.
1000-EXIT. EXIT.

venosol · New User Joined: 16 Nov 2006 Posts: 43 Location: Bangalore

agkshirsagar · Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2007 3:42 pm

dick scherrer · Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2007 10:36 pm

Hello,

Please refer to the prior replies quoting the manual. If you actually did what the quoted manual says you could not code:

agkshirsagar · Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 11:22 am

Dick,
It is allowed to code EXIT like the example mentioned above.
As I already stated, it will be trated as CONTINUE.

dick scherrer · Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 7:20 pm

Hello Abhijit,

I've no doubt that it may "be gotten away with" - i do not believe it should be used. As the prior post showed from the Fine Manual, the only proper way to code an EXIT is to make it the only statement in a paragraph and it really has only one good use - to terminate a "perform thru".

There are many things we can get away with that we still should not use. If, in that example, a CONTINUE makes sense, a CONTINUE should be coded, not the mis-used EXIT. Think of some night a year or 2 later when there is a problem in that program and the person called to fix the problem is not the author (indeed, the author may not even work there any more) - how much time might they waste trying to figure out why that bit of potentially mis-leading code was in the program. . .

IMHO

agkshirsagar · Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 11:23 am

I agree with you Dick on that. I never used EXIT like the example Venu gave us and will never need to.

Josh_winkelstein · Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 1:48 am

As previously noted, the EXIT statement is primarily or exclusively valid as a way to exit a PERFORM THRU structure.

A somewhat less obvious thing about this is that once you have reached the end of processing in the 9999-SOMETHING paragraph, you can GO TO the 9999-EXIT paragraph and still have a fully structured program. You can use this to skip any statements you know you don't have to execute if some condition is fulfilled, and thereby increase the efficiency of your code.

Unfortunately, the prohibition against the use of GO TO is often so strong that that the use of it in this situation, while valid and structured, will be denied or prohibited without any consideration.