Unless, of course, you are putting yourself through school and only able to afford to go part-time.

I was stress testing the keyboard for slobber...

... and that's just for the halibut...

Chris, I think LockH is correct here in the description of producing a smaller faster runtime. That was because of the expense associated with the actual machine run-time allocation. That said, I think what this is doing is ensuring that the memory area used by K01 and K02 does not contain any incorrect or "ghost" information in the memory that could cause untraceable error messages within the program. You'll have to track down the actual use of the K01 and K02 and determine what those were used for. Something else to consider: COBOL was written for batch processing. It was only in the later years that the computer time became inexpensive enough to begin interactive processing. That said, this is most likely a "run this once a month, once a week, once a quarter" type program. That may help you in the detective work for the actual use of the program and/or the actual use of the environment that is being created here.

Chris, check your "image processing toolkit" support email address. I've sent you an email for offline help.

What is the definition line in the WORKING-STORAGE SECTION for "LOW-VALUES"? It's probably an "01" or "77" line. If it's a "77" line, it will not have anything underneath it that subdivides it like the "01" lines do. Because of the ">" in the PERFORM statement, you are using a "newer" version of COBOL (the older - COBOL 68, 74 standards forced the relationals to be written out "IS GREATER THAN"). Not that that's helpful at this point, but you may be able to find the "newer" COBOL manual(s). Are there any COMMENTS in the IDENTIFICATION DIVISION that tell you what this program is supposed to do? I also wonder, does this program have a LINKAGE SECTION in it? If so, this code could be called from another program.

I work for a contractor. The DIVISION and SECTION that the code is in would be helpful, as the code would have a different function depending on where it is located. If in the SCHEMA SECTION, this is most likely a set of Key lookup tables. If in the LINKAGE SECTION, this could be a subroutine pass from another programming language. If this is in the WORKING-STORAGE SECTION, it's possible that the original programmer was trying to write a piece of code in Assembler and have it called as a binary routine. If this is the case, there will be a LOADING paragraph in the PROCEDURE DIVISION.

Funny, that's who I work for. Which DIVISION and SECTION is this piece of code in?

INDEXED BY means that K01-1 is an array that uses K01-1-X as the array subscript. Information on the PIC 9(04) COMP-5 found at http://www-01.ibm.com/software/awdtools/cobol/os390/about/ : Data items declared with the new USAGE COMP-5 data type are represented in storage as binary data and can contain values of magnitude up to the capacity of the native binary representation (2, 4, or 8 bytes). With USAGE COMP-5, data values are no longer limited to the value implied by the number of 9s in the picture for the item. These enhancements help your COBOL applications to exploit the open, network-computing environment, making COBOL a more powerful application development tool. From what I remember of COBOL, K0x numbers were normally used as database keys. This particular piece of code probably has around it a SCHEMA SECTION that defines the database that this memory area becomes the KeyIDs for. K01 and K02 are most likely lookup tables for some information found elsewhere in the code. Where did you find the vacuum tube that held this?

John Carpenter's "Dark Star"

Is there a way to display the DPI (bitdepth) property of an image file such that it can be captured or displayed? Okay, now the background of this: I'm working on scanning family historical photos at home and, as part of the photo information, I want to capture what DPI I scanned the photos at. Some are 300 DPI, some 600 DPI, etc. I don't want to have to check the property page for each image (there are now ~600 images in the collection). I'd like to generate a way to do this via javascript/vbscript if possible, so that I can gather other information while writing the information to the database. I'd also like to keep the number of dependant programs to a minimum. Thanks, -m