PL/I for Experienced Programmers Training

This course introduces and explains the PL/I programming language, and teaches experienced programmers how to code, maintain and debug PL/I programs. As well as covering the syntax of all the main PL/I statements, the course gives attendees a great start to using PL/I confidently, correctly and efficiently. Several exercises are used to consolidate all the major topics covered. The final exercise builds up to a complete and well structured program. The course is designed for the IBM Enterprise PL/I compiler.<br><br>This course is available 'on demand' (minimum 2 students) for public presentations and for one-company, on-site presentations.

All attendees should be experienced applications programmers with an understanding of the mainframe computing environment. This can be gained by attending the course IBM z Systems - Explained. The ability to edit programs and submit jobs is also assumed.

• code typical commercial PL/I programs using efficient and structured code
• write efficient and structured code
• compile, test and debug PL/I programs
• access and use the online PL/I manuals effectively.

PL/I concepts

Format,; PL/1 character set; Keywords,; coding standards.

Declarations

Files; Character; Bit; Decimal; Binary. Picture; Initialization.

Files

Sequential input and output; fixed length records; move mode and locate mode; stream output for errors and debugging; print files; ENVIRONMENT option.

Assignments

Data conversion and precision; expression evaluation, operators.

Structures and arrays

Expressions; assignments; LIKE; BY NAME; initialization.

Program logic

IF THEN ELSE; SELECT; DO loops.

Program structure

Procedures; internal and external; function procedures; arguments and parameters

Condition handling

General concepts; enabling and disabling ERROR and ENDFILE etc..

Storage

Automatic; static, based; aligned and unaligned; internal and external pointers and addresses.

Built-in functions

SUBSTR; ADDR; VERIFY; DATETIME; TRANSLATE; others.

Compiler options

GONUMBER; LIST; OPTIMIZE; AGGREGATE; ATTR & XREF; others.

Efficiency and debugging

STATIC; REORDER; others.

Standards

Standards, whether general or in house, are emphasised

Testing and debugging

Compile; link edit; JCL; program execution; test data creation; error messages.