sathya swaminathan

 Profile Answers by sathya swaminathan 

• May 8th, 2008

 

Say the following is your cobol code:

000340 01  TREE-TYPE      PIC X(15) VALUE 'BANANATREE'. 000350 01  FRUIT-TYPE     PIC X(15) VALUE 'BANANA'.     000360 01  TREE-FRUIT     PIC X(5).   If you wanna move only particular value to another variable instead of as a whole value you can use reference modification.
For Eg :

You can say
004310 004320     MOVE TREE-TYPE(1:5) TO TREE-FRUIT. 004440 

This will move "BANAN" to TREE-FRUIT. (The letters from position 1 of TREE-TYPE for 5 positions.So this : (colon) is called ref modification indicator.Like this you can use MOVE TREE-TYPE(2:4) TO TREE-FRUIT.So the character from 2nd position for 4 character length will get move.   

guraddiv

 Profile Answers by guraddiv 

• May 12th, 2008

 

it is a techinque which is used to extract some part of a variable.

pawan_kch

 Profile Answers by pawan_kch 

• Jun 20th, 2008

 

Reference modification is used to retrieve/replace the set of characters from a string.

Ex: MOVE WS-VAR(1:5) TO PV-VAR.
      MOVE 'GEEK' TO WS-VAR(1:4).
     

ramesh4greek

 Profile Answers by ramesh4greek 

• Jun 11th, 2010

 

Yes the above 2 steps are correct. By using reference modifcation we can write reverse of a string, right angle and piramid.........