Changes in COBOL for OS/390 & VM, Version 2 Release 2
- Enhanced support for decimal data, raising the maximum number of decimal digits from 18 to 31 and providing an extended-precision mode for arithmetic calculations
- Enhanced production debugging using overlay hooks rather than compiled in hooks, with symbolic debugging information optionally in a separate file
- Support for compiling, linking, and running in the OS/390® UNIX System Services environment, with COBOL files able to reside in the hierarchical file system (HFS)
- Toleration of fork(), exec(), and spawn(); and the ability to call UNIX/POSIX functions
- Enhanced input-output function, permitting dynamic file allocation by means of an environment variable named in SELECT. . . ASSIGN, and the accessing of sequentially organized HFS files including by means of ACCEPT and DISPLAY
- Support for line-sequential file organization for accessing HFS files that contain text data, with records delimited by the new-line character
- COMP-5 data type, new to host COBOL, allowing values of magnitude up to the capacity of the native binary representation
- Significant performance improvement in processing binary data with the TRUNC(BIN) compiler option
- Support for linking of COBOL applications using the OS/390 DFSMS binder alone, with the prelinker required only in exceptional cases under CICS®
- Diagnosis of moves (implicit or explicit) that result in numeric truncation enabled through compiler option DIAGTRUNC
- System-determined block size for the listing data set available by specifying BLKSIZE=0
- Limit on block size of QSAM tape files raised to 2 GB
- Support under CICS for DISPLAY to the system logical output device and ACCEPT for obtaining date and time
- Support for the Db2® coprocessor enabled through the SQL compiler option, eliminating the need for a separate precompile step and permitting SQL statements in nested programs and copybooks
- Support for the millennium language extensions now included in the base COBOL product