Sort/Merge Operations & Report Writing

Two genuinely distinct real features have traveled together since COBOL's own early history — real sort/merge facilities and a real, declarative report-writing facility, both introduced together in COBOL-61 Extended (1963). One puts data in order; the other turns ordered data into a formatted, paginated report with almost no manual layout code at all.

SORT: Real Ordering, USING/GIVING

A real SORT reorders an entire file by one or more keys — the leftmost is the real major key, each one after it a progressively less significant tiebreaker:

USING and GIVING handle the real file mechanics automatically — opening, reading every input record, and closing, then writing every sorted record to the output and closing that too. Real INPUT PROCEDURE/OUTPUT PROCEDURE phrases can replace either one when records genuinely need selecting or modifying on the way in or out — but never together with the plain phrase they'd be replacing.

MERGE: Real Combining, Not Sorting

MERGE looks similar but does a genuinely different job — it combines files that are already sorted on the same real key into one, without ever sorting anything itself:

Report Writer: A Genuinely Declarative Alternative to Hand-Written Reports

Real Report Writer lets a program declare what a report should look like — the programmer specifies layout and data, not the real logic for page breaks, headings, and formatting:

Four real statements drive the whole thing: INITIATE starts the report, GENERATE produces one real detail line (and automatically fires a real control break whenever WS-BRANCH-CODE genuinely changes value), SUPPRESS can skip a line that would otherwise print, and TERMINATE closes the report out.

Hands-On Exercises