In COBOL, one may write invalid programs or use invalid data in program which can be compiled and executed but lead to technically incorrect or even unexpected results.  It's the responsibility of the COBOL programmer to make sure that programs and data are valid, and as the behavior of invalid programs (or programs with invalid data) is undefined, IBM makes no guarantees that the result in these cases won't change between compiler releases or even PTFs. While migrating from Enterprise COBOL V4.2 to Enterprise COBOL V5, some users... [More]

The Enterprise COBOL for z/OS V5.2 May 2015 PTFs are now available for download. Here are the details:         COMPILER       UI27877 / UI27878 / UI27879        RUNTIME       UI27688(V1R13) / UI27689(V2R1)   List of APARs for Enterprise COBOL for z/OS V5.2 May 2015 PTFs

The Enterprise COBOL for z/OS 5.x March 2015 Runtime PTFs are now available for download.  This runtime PTF supports applications compiled with the Enterprise COBOL for z/OS 5.1 compiler, and now adds support for applications compiled with the 5.2 compiler.      RUNTIME      UI26506(V1R13) / UI26507(V2R1) PTFs For the list of all APARs fixed, see Fix list for Enterprise COBOL for z/OS

Enterprise COBOL for z/OS V5.2 provides day 1 support for the new z processor. Besides the ability to generate new z13 instructions, this new compiler also has abilities to use the new Vector Facility for certain COBOL statements, and expand usage of Decimal Floating Point Facility for Packed Decimal calculations. Enterprise COBOL V5.2 provides significant performance improvements over the GA release of Enterprise COBOL V5.1. Well-structured, compute intensive batch applications running on z13 (compiled with Enterprise COBOL V5.2) have shown... [More]

Tags:  cobol enterprise v5

This is the sixth in a series of blog entries on the subject of debugging IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS V5.1 using Debug Tool. These blog entries point out some of the improvements you'll see compared to debugging earlier versions of Enterprise COBOL. This blog entry is regarding Debug Tool's support for COBOL data types. With previous versions of COBOL there were several restrictions on which data types were supported in the various Debug Tool commands. In particular, commands which perform assignment, such as MOVE, and commands which... [More]

Tags:  debug cobol

Enterprise COBOL V5 provides increased exploitation of the latest z/Architecture processors, as well as new levels of optimization, to improve the performance of z/OS COBOL applications. To that effect, several new compiler options are introduced in V5, including AFP, ARCH, HGPR, OPTIMIZE, and STGOPT. Some were mentioned in previous blogs and now we want to bring the HGPR option in.   The HGPR option controls the compiler usage of the 64-bit registers provided by z/Architecture processors, and its syntax is as follows:... [More]

Tags:  gpr optimization hgpr

Recently the documentation for COBOL for Enterprise V5.1 was updated to handle some Reader Comment Forms (RCF) and fix defects against this release. The documentation changes aim to address customers' comments on certain topics, fix or update topic links, provide more details for some contents, remove outdated information, and make documentation better conform the IBM style. The updating work is still going on to improve manuals as much as possible, but you can have a view of the change list shown as below and get the idea of what... [More]

This is the fifth in a series of blog entries on the subject of debugging IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS V5.1 using Debug Tool. These blog entries point out some of the improvements you'll see compared to debugging earlier versions of Enterprise COBOL. In my most recent blog entry I described some improvements for listing the contents and attributes of COBOL tables (arrays). In this entry I'll continue exploring Debug Tool's support for tables, and how it has improved with COBOL 5.1, providing better usability and support for COBOL... [More]

Tags:  debug cobol

This is the fourth in a series of blog entries on the subject of debugging IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS V5.1 using Debug Tool. These blog entries point out some of the improvements you'll see compared to debugging earlier versions of Enterprise COBOL. In this entry I'll describe a number of changes that you'll see when working with COBOL tables (arrays) in Debug Tool. Some of these changes provide more consistent and streamlined output of the table information or contents, and other changes provide better support for COBOL language... [More]

Tags:  debug cobol