IBM Mainframe Forum

If evaluate statement is to be replaced which one of these suits better?

NESTED IF, IF THEN ELSE, IF ELSE

Depends.

Why do you want to replace it, anyway?

Well, it was a question I was asked. "Evaluate is similar to"

Why don't you look up the book/notes you used when learning COBOL? Or is this an interview question that should have been posted in the Interview Questions section along with your response.

Hello and welcome to the forum,

Hopefully, when the question was asked, more info was given.

As asked, the only answer i would give would be the same as Nic's - it depends.

All 3 as it was before COBOL II.

Actually, there are only 2 options there as IF ELSE is a synonym of IF THEN ELSE.

If you were looking at directly replacing existing code with an EVALUATE, the most likely candidates would be a "nested IF", a series of IFs with GO TOs or a plain old GO TO ... DEPENDING ON ...

However, you could replace any IF with an EVALUATE in its simplest form, or number of IFs of any variety if you would accept a non-1:1 relationship between what was replaced and the "legs" of the EVALUATE.