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WHAT'S NEW IN VS COBOL II Release 4?

 

1. From VS COBOL II Release 3, IBM Introduces 31 bit addressing. 31-Bit means your program now run on above line. That means you can address above 16 MB from your Cobol program. That means your data division size is now 2^31.That means your program size is now up to 2GB, But to use this feature your OS must be a XA or ESA system.

2. A PTF-level "eye catcher" is stored in most VS COBOL II compiler and library modules. The "eye catcher" shows the number of the latest PTF
(Program Temporary Fix) applied to the module, thus aiding in the maintenance and debugging of the VS COBOL II product.

3. SAA -Support with high object portability between the MVS, VM, and VSE operating environments, and between the CICS/MVS(*), CICS/VM(*), and CICS / VSE(*) transaction processing environments, provided that the functions and services used are available or supported in the target
operating systems and environments.

4. Support of the intermediate subset of the COBOL 85 Standard under VSE / ESA, and support of most of the high subset, with the exception of the following language features:

a) EXTEND phrase of the OPEN statement (However, OPEN EXTEND for VSAM sequential files is supported.)
b) REVERSED phrase of the OPEN statement
c) OF/IN phrase of the COPY statement

5. Different treatment of blank lines and comment lines that appear in pseudo-text-1 in the COPY REPLACING and REPLACE statements.

6. Changed precedence of USE procedures in contained programs, so that USE procedure precedence goes from the current program to its
containing program, and so on to the outermost program.

7. Application of a maximum-length receiver rule to reference-modified variable-length group items that contain their own OCCURS DEPENDING ON object, so that when the group item is used as a receiving item, its maximum length will be used regardless of any reference-modifier.


 OTHER FEATURES IN VS COBOL II (from previous releases):

* Complete Support of all ANSI-85 standards for COBOL

* DBCS/KANJI data set support with EBCDIC

* National Language support

* System Application Architecture (SAA) support for Program Portability

* Enhanced Diagnostic message

* COMP-4 data type (which is same as COMP)

* Debugging enhancements like CMPR2

* SORT/MERGE now allows for INDEX/RELATIVE Files under SEQUENTIAL/DYNAMIC mode.

 

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