title: Eclipse Code Templates with Cobol
body: <p>People,</p>
  
  <p>My team is just beginning to learn how to use COBOL on Eclipse (as part of the Rational Developer for System Z package) and one of our most desired features are code templates or code snippets. </p>
  
  <p>What we'd like to have is a code completion based on snippets just like we have on Java. For example, when I type <code>try</code> and hit ctrl-space Eclipse shows me a list of completion options, where one of those is create a try/catch block. Well, in COBOL one could leverage this when creating, for example, embedded SQL blocks, like</p>
  
  <pre><code>EXEC SQL
      SELECT field, field, field,
      FROM table
  WHERE field = value, 
        field = value
  END-EXEC.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However, for some reason, it seems that Eclipse treats COBOL a little differently (no wonder why) from other languages. As such, when looking for the code templates in the preferences menu for COBOL, its appearance is very different from the Java one.</p>
  
  <p>The question is: how does one uses Eclipse's code templates with COBOL?</p>