Communicator 3000 MPE/iX Release 6.0 (Platform Software Release C.60.00) (30216-90269)

74 Chapter 5

Application Development

COBOL II/iX Enhancements

by Walter Murray

Support Technology Lab

Overview

COBOL II/iX on MPE/iX 6.0 provides several enhancements that were

requested by Interex SIGCOBOL. Some of these enhancements have

already been made available in various patches to MPE/iX 5.5.

This article gives an overview. For details, refer to "COBOL II/iX

Enhancements" in chapter 10, "Technical Articles."

1. COBOL now provides the ability to specify secondary entry points in

a main program. The ENTRY statement, which was previously

allowed only in subprograms, may now be used in the main program.

The nonnumeric literal speciﬁed in the ENTRY statement becomes

the name of a secondary entry point for the program, and it can be

speciﬁed in the MPE/iX RUN command.

2. Support is now provided for procedure call by plabel. In a CALL

statement, the identiﬁer designating the subprogram to be called

may now be the name of a numeric data item. It will be interpreted

as a procedure label of a previously loaded procedure, and the

compiler will generate a dynamic call to that procedure.

3. Six new procedures have been added to the run-time library to

simplify bit manipulation in COBOL.

4. Compiler limits were increased to permit compiling much larger

programs, such as those created by automated code generation tools.

COBOL II/iX should now be able to compile programs in excess of

200,000 lines of source code.

5. An index-name may now be used as the operand of a DISPLAY

statement.

6. Attempting to compile a source ﬁle in Qedit format, on a system

where Qedit is not properly installed, will now result in a speciﬁc

error message suggesting a problem related to Qedit. Qedit is a

full-screen text editor from Robelle Consulting Ltd.