REBOL for COBOL programmers

ENVIRONMENT DIVISION

Date written: October 3, 2012
Date revised:
Date reviewed:

This explains the REBOL equivalent of the ENVIRONMENT DIVISION (if there is one).

COBOL ENVIRONMENT DIVISION

The COBOL ENVIRONMENT DIVISION is where the programmer indicates the environment in which the program will run, that is, the kind of computer, meanings of runtime switches, the usage of the comma as a decimal point, the files the program will be reading or writing. Those items of information are put after certain headers. The headers are like this, and most are required even if there is nothing after them.

ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
CONFIGURATION SECTION.
SOURCE-COMPUTER.
OBJECT-COMPUTER.
INPUT-OUTPUT SECTION.
FILE-CONTROL.
I-O-CONTROL.

The REBOL equivalent

There is nothing in REBOL that resembles the COBOL ENVIRONMENT DIVISION. Those items of the ENVIRONMENT DIVISION that are just basically comments might have places in the REBOL header or would be covered by comments placed anywhere you like.

While there is no environment stuff that you must code, there is plenty of environment stuff that REBOL keeps track of and that you have access to. That will be covered elsewhere. Here we are concerned with stuff that you are required to specify about the program's environment, and there is basically none of that.