TAL/pTAL programming

Prerequisites

• Concepts and facilities course

Recommended: At least six months of programming experience, preferably with C, PASCAL, or other block-structured procedure-based languages. Alternatively, one year of COBOL 85 programming experience.

Audience

Systems programmers or maintainers who want to become proficient TAL or pTAL programmers.

Ways to save

Benefits to you

• Introduction to TAL/pTAL
• Program organization and general syntax
• Simple data types and arrays
• Data transfer, program control, and data scan statements
• Operators and expressions
• Pointers and addressing
• Procedures and subprocedures
• The Common Run-Time Environment; Interfacing C and TAL
• Building native mode programs
• Debugging with the Inspect tool

Next Steps

Guardian API programming

Course outline

• Introduction to TAL/pTAL
• Transaction Application Language (TAL and pTAL)
• TAL/pTAL programming in the Guardian environment of the HP NonStop Kernel operating system
• Tools to assist the developer in writing and debugging TAL and pTAL programs
• Program organization and general syntax
• Basic syntax and organization of TAL programs
• Identifiers, begin-end blocks, constants, operators, variable declarations, and procedure declarations
• Compiler (both TAL and pTAL) directives that control listings
• Sourcing from another file
• The environment set up for the Inspect product and compile for syntax only
• Basic Inspect software commands
• Simple data types and arrays
• How data is stored and what facilities TAL provides to access data
• Correct data types for various purposes, definitions, literals, labels, and data equivalencing
• Program flow statements Types of program flow statements and their usage
• Statements for CASE, IF, program control, bit extraction, and manipulation
• Lab exercise:
• Use constructs such as the CASE statement and WHILE loop
• Terminal I/O
• How to perform terminal I/O in programs
• Error handling and data conversion
• Lab exercise:
• Perform terminal I/O to prompt for data and implement data conversion
• Operators and expressions
• Types of operators and expressions
• Arithmetic expressions and conditional expressions
• Special expressions such as: assignment, CASE, IF, and group comparison expressions
• Pointers and addressing
• Direct and indirect data access, pointers, and structures
• Additional pTAL pointer data types
• Data transfer and scan statements to illustrate use of pointers and structures
• PTAL caveats
• Lab exercise:
• Use pointers, addressing, and data movement
• Procedures and subprocedures
• Procedures and subprocedures, with or without parameter passing
• Procedure declaration, subprocedure declaration, and procedure calls and returns
• The use of formal and actual parameters in procedure calls and returns
• TAL and pTAL considerations for Guardian procedures that are obsolete for pTAL procedures
• Lab exercise:
• Code procedures, with and without parameters
• Invoke procedures, with and without parameters
• Interfacing C and TAL
• Common Run-Time Environment (CRE)
• How to interface C and TAL and memory model considerations
• Use of development tools such as Bind, nld, and noft
• Lab exercise:
• Build runnable units from separately compiled C and/or TAL objects