TAL/pTAL Programming Training in Switzerland

This 4-day course teaches a basic understanding of the Transaction Application Language (TAL) and its usage. Through a series of exercises and labs, students will gain sufficient understanding of syntax and operations to develop and maintain TAL and pTAL programs.

Prerequisites

• Concepts and Facilities course

Recommended: At least six months of programming experience, preferably with C, PASCAL, or other block-structured procedure based languages. Alternatively, one year of COBOL 85 programming experience

Audience

Systems programmers or maintainers who want to become proficient TAL or pTAL programmers.

• Introduction to TAL/pTAL
• Program organization and general syntax
• Simple data types and arrays
• Data transfer, program control, and data scan statements
• Operators and expressions
• Pointers and addressing
• Procedures and subprocedures
• The Common Run-Time Environment; Interfacing C and TAL
• Building native mode programs
• Debugging with the Inspect tool

Benefits to you

• Introduction to TAL/pTAL
• Program organization and general syntax
• Simple data types and arrays
• Data transfer, program control, and data scan statements
• Operators and expressions
• Pointers and addressing
• Procedures and subprocedures
• The Common Run-Time Environment; Interfacing C and TAL
• Building native mode programs
• Debugging with the Inspect tool

Introduction to TAL/pTAL

• Introduce the Tandem Transaction Application Language (TAL and pTAL)
• Describe TAL/pTAL programming in the Guardian environment
• Describe tools to assist the developer in writing and debugging TAL and pTAL programs

Program organization and general syntax

• Discuss basic syntax and organization of TAL programs
• Discuss identifiers, begin-end blocks, constants, operators, variable declarations, and procedure declarations.
• Describe compiler (both TAL and pTAL) directives that control listings
• Describe sourcing from another file
• Explain the environment set up for the Inspect product and compile for syntax only
• Demonstrate basic Inspect software commands

Simple data types and arrays program flow statements

• Describe how data is stored and what facilities TAL provides to access data
• Discuss correct data types for various purposes, definitions, literals, labels, and data equivalencing
• Describe types of program flow statements and their usage
• Describe statements for CASE, IF, program control, bit extraction, and manipulation
• Lab Exercise
• Use constructs such as the CASE statement and WHILE loop

Terminal I/O

• Discuss how to perform terminal I/O in programs
• Discuss error handling and data conversion
• Lab Exercise
• Perform terminal I/O to prompt for data and implement data conversion

Operators and expressions

• Describe types of operators and expressions
• Discuss arithmetic expressions and conditional expressions
• Discuss special expressions such as: assignment, CASE, IF, and group comparison expressions

Pointers and addressing

• Describe direct and indirect data access, pointers, and structures.
• Discuss additional pTAL pointer data types
• Discuss data transfer and scan statements to illustrate use of pointers and structures
• Describe pTAL caveats
• Lab Exercise
• Use pointers, addressing, and data movement

Procedures and subprocedures

• Describe procedures and subprocedures, with or without parameter passing
• Discuss procedure declaration, subprocedure declaration, and procedure calls and returns
• Explain the use of formal and actual parameters in procedure calls and returns
• Discuss TAL and pTAL considerations for Guardian procedures that are obsolete for pTAL procedures
• Lab Exercise
• Code procedures, with and without parameters
• Invoke procedures, with and without parameters

Interfacing C and TAL

• Describe the Common Run-Time Environment (CRE)
• Demonstrate ho to interface C and TAL and memory model considerations
• Discuss the use of development tools such as Bind, nld, and noft
• Lab Exercise
• Build runnable units from separately compiled C and/or TAL objects