Changes in IBM® Enterprise COBOL for z/OS, Version 5 Release 2

New and changed options

  • The following compiler options are new:
    • COPYRIGHT
    • QUALIFY(COMPAT|EXTEND)
    • SERVICE
    • SQLIMS
    • VLR(COMPAT|STANDARD)
    • XMLPARSE(XMLSS|COMPAT)
    • ZONEDATA(PFD|MIG)
  • The following compiler options are modified:
    • ARCH: ARCH(6) is no longer accepted. A new higher level of ARCH(11) is accepted, and ARCH(7) is the default.
    • MAP: New suboptions HEX and DEC are added to the MAP compiler option to control whether hexadecimal or decimal offsets are shown for MAP output in the compiler listing. It eases your migration to Enterprise COBOL V5.2 if your programs are compiled with Enterprise COBOL V4 or earlier versions.
  • The following compiler option is removed:
    • SIZE

New and changed functions

  • The compatibility-mode COBOL XML parser from the COBOL library is supported. You can specify the XMLPARSE(XMLSS|COMPAT) compiler option to choose between parsing with the z/OS® XML System Services parser, or with the compatibility-mode COBOL XML parser. This feature can ease the migration to the Enterprise COBOL V5 compiler for programs with XML PARSE statements that were compiled with Enterprise COBOL V3, or with V4 compiler with the XMLPARSE(COMPAT) compiler option.
  • Enterprise COBOL applications that use object-oriented syntax for Java™ interoperability are now supported with Java 6, Java 7 and Java 8. Java SDK 1.4.2 and Java 5 are no longer supported.

New and changed statements

  • The new CALLINTERFACE directive specifies the interface convention for CALL and SET statements. The convention specified stays in effect until another CALLINTERFACE directive is encountered in the source. The CALLINTERFACE directive has three suboptions: DLL, DYNAMIC, and STATIC.
  • The EXIT statement includes the following new formats, which provide a structured way to exit without using a GO TO statement. The new formats are part of the 2002 COBOL Standard.
    • EXIT PERFORM for exiting from an inline PERFORM statement
    • EXIT PARAGRAPH for exiting from the middle of a paragraph
    • EXIT SECTION for exiting from a section
  • A new format of the SORT statement, the table SORT statement, arranges table elements in a user-specified sequence. It is part of the 2002 COBOL Standard.
  • New keywords LEADING and TRAILING are added to the REPLACING phrase of the COPY statement and the REPLACE statement to improve partial-word replacement operations. The new keywords are part of the 2002 COBOL Standard.
  • A new keyword VOLATILE is added to the format 1 data description entry. The VOLATILE clause indicates that a data item's value can be modified or referenced in ways that the compiler cannot detect, such as by a Language Environment® (LE) condition handler routine or by some other asynchronous process or thread. Thus, optimization is restricted for the data item.
  • New syntaxes are introduced to the XML GENERATE statement. The WHEN phrase from the explicit form of the SUPPRESS phrase can be omitted to unconditionally suppress identifier-8 in the output of the XML Generate statement. If the WHEN phrase is omitted, identifier-8 can be a group data item. In addition, the generic-suppression-phrase of the XML GENERATE statement provides a convenient way to exclude entire classes and categories of data items from the generated XML output based on suppression criteria. The data items to which the suppression specifications apply and that meet the criteria at run time will be excluded. CONTENT is treated as a distinct type for suppression.