Is there any specific reason why HIGH VALUES are moved while coding a cobol internal array.
Reviewing some programs and found only 1 of them coded with high values but not the rest so curious.
Any advantages or disadvantages.
The above URL has a good description of HIGH-VALUES and LOW-VALUES.
Reading the essay that appears there, I will try to make a “mental note” about it, in case I should ever find myself in an environment in which the Company had decided to switch hardware-platforms, and “port” its COBOL code from one to the other.
In such a situation, I would probably want to scan the code of every program that was scheduled to be “ported” to the new computer; and I would search for “HIGH-VALUES” and “LOW-VALUES” (in every possible combination of “capital” and “lowercase” letters).
And then, I would evaluate each program in which those reserved-words were used, to see whether or not the programs were relying on the hardware’s native collating sequence, or whether the programs had created a special-purpose collating sequence,…
…just to make sure that there was no way for “undefined (anomalous) results” to occur, at run-time, when programs that had “worked just fine”, on the old hardware, were re-compiled and executed, on the new hardware.