CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cobolgnucobol
Liosoft
Liosoft

Reputation: 11

COBOL ERASE sentence

I'm watching COBOL tutorials, they use the "erase" statement to clean the screen and it doesn't work for me. The compiler indicates "syntax error, unexpected ERASE"

The code is:

DISPLAY "1.- CALC, 2.- CLOSE" ERASE.

It is my mistake?

I am using opencobol on ubuntu Sorry about my English, it's not my native language

Upvotes: 1

Views: 380

Answers (1)

Simon Sobisch
Simon Sobisch

Reputation: 7297

As noted by @user207421 ERASE is not a statement, it is a clause for the DISPLAY statement, and it even is standardized - but (standard-wise) it needs a specification what you want to erase:

ERASE [END] [OF] LINE
      [END] [OF] SCREEN
      EOL
      EOS

The syntax you have shown is actually the very non-standard, outdated Microsoft-COBOL DISPLAY statement with ERASE phrase.

If you still use open-cobol then the package is heavily outdated, there should be a new gnucobol package available in Ubuntu (otherwise you could build from source). Using GnuCOBOL 2.2 you get a nicer error message:

error: syntax error, unexpected ., expecting LINE or SCREEN

And then you can decide if you want the old ms-cobol variant (that's supported in GnuCOBOL, but only with the pos-specifier) or the standard variant (ERASE EOS would be the compatible version and is supported by many compilers).

Upvotes: 3

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