Enhancements in this release

This release provides the following functional enhancements that are described in this and the other IBM PL/I books.

Changes in GC27-8930-00, August 2017

The compiler now supports five time-only patterns: HHMISS, HH:MI:SS, HHMI, HH:MI, HH. See Date/time built-in functions.

Changes in GC27-8930-00, April 2017

Enhancements in usability:

The compiler now flags unreachable ASSERT UNREACHABLE statements with a different message than it flags other unreachable statements.
The compiler now expands in the AGGREGATE listing typed structures that are member of other structures.
The attributes listing now shows the contents of the VALUE attribute for CHARACTER and BIT constants of length 256 or less and also for numeric PICTURE constants

New or changed statements and conditions:

The ASSERT statement now supports a new ASSERT COMPARE statement that provides a more information-rich way to test an assertion that the actual value of an expression compares correctly with an expected value.
The new ASSERTION condition will be raised when an ASSERT statement fails and the ASSERT(CONDITION) compiler option is in effect.
The PROCEDURE statement and ENTRY statement now support the EXTERNAL attribute as an optional argument.

New or changed built-in functions, pseudovariables, and subroutines:

The new BASE64ENCODE built-in function encodes a source buffer into a buffer holding its base 64 value in the character set specified by the ASCII/EBCDIC suboption of the DEFAULT compiler option, and the new BASE64DECODE built-in function decodes a source buffer from base 64 that is encoded in the character set specified by the ASCII/EBCDIC suboption of the DEFAULT compiler option.
The new BINSEARCH and BINSEARCHX built-in functions generate code to perform binary searches for a specified value within an array either by doing a simple comparison or by invoking a user-specified function to perform the desired comparison.
The new CODEPAGE built-in function helps you write code conditional on the value of the compiler’s CODEPAGE option and to query the value of that compiler option.
The new COLLAPSE and SQUEEZE built-in functions return a string that reduces all multiple occurrences of a character to one, starting from an optional specified position or with an optionally specified starting position.
The new DAYSTOMICROSECS built-in function returns a number of microseconds that corresponds to a number of days.
The new FILENEW built-in function returns a FILE variable that points to a new file constant in automatic storage.
The new GETJCLSYMBOL and GETSYSWORD built-in functions return a CHARACTER string value that represents the requested exported JCL symbol or the value of the requested system information.
The new HEX8 and HEXIMAGE8 built-in functions return the hex value of an expression as a UTF-8 string.
The LOWERCASE and UPPERCASE built-in functions now accept an second optional argument, so that you can specify a code page that all characters will be converted to their lowercase equivalent or uppercase equivalent. All A-Z/a-z values and Ä-unlaut/ä-umlaunt values will be converted to it's equivalent.
The new MEMCOLLAPSE built-in function fills a target buffer with the contents of a source buffer with all multiple occurrences of a specified character replaced by one, while the leading and trailing instances of that character are also trimmed. It returns a size_t value that indicates the number of bytes written to the target buffer.
The new MEMSQUEEZE built-in function fills a target buffer with the contents of a source buffer with all multiple occurrences of a specified character replaced by one. It returns a size_t value that indicates the number of bytes written to the target buffer.
The new built-in functions MICROSECS, MICROSECSTODATE, MICROSECSTODAYS and UTCMICROSECS provide the ability to use an 8-byte integer microseconds value to hold a time value and to convert between it and a date/time string without the rounding problem inherent in the floating-point seconds value.
The new MINVAL and MAXVAL built-in functions return the minimum value or the maximum value that its numeric operand could assume.
The new ONACTUAL and ONEXPECTED built-in functions return a character string that is the value of the “actual” expression or "expected' expression in an ASSERT COMPARE statement when the ASSERTION condition is raised.
The new ONTEXT built-in function returns a character string that is the value of the TEXT string in an ASSERT statement when the ASSERTION condition is raised.
The new ONPACKAGE built-in function returns a character string that is the name of the PACKAGE when the ASSERTION condition is raised.
The new ONPROCEDURE built-in function returns the name of a procedure in which a condition is raised. ONPROCEDURE and ONPROC now are supported as the preferred name of the ONLOC built-in function.
The REPATTERN and TIMESTAMP built-in functions now can be used to obtain the current date and time in the z system format of YYYY-MM-DD HH:MI:SS.999999.
The ROUNDDEC built-in function has been renamed as ROUNDAWAYFROMZERO.
The new ROUNDTOEVEN built-in function returns the value of x rounded at a digit specified by n following the rounding rule of round half to even.

CICS enhancements:

The CICS preprocessor output now includes a listing of all the CICS options in effect when the preprocessor run.

Enhancements in usability

The compiler now supports 64-bit applications under the LP(64) option. This means that under this option, POINTER and HANLDE can be eight bytes in size, structures and arrays can be larger than 2G in size, and many built-in functions (such as PLIMOVE) can take 8-byte integer arguments and return 8-byte integer results.
The INITIAL attribute is now allowed on macro declare statements.
The JSONNAME attribute provides the ability to specify the name that is used or expected for a variable in jsonPut or jsonGet functions. In particular, with this attribute you can specify a name that does not conform to PL/I name rules.
The JSONOMIT attribute indicates that fields of certain data items must be omitted from output that is generated by JSON functions. In particular, if a variable has the JSONOMIT attribute, the jsonPut functions will omit this variable from the generated text if the variable is equal to a null string ‘’.
The SUPPRESS attribute now accepts NOPADDING as a subattribute, which can be applied on a variable. If specified on a level-1 structure name, SUPPRESS(NOPADDING) causes the RULES(NOPADDING) compiler option to be ignored for that structure.
The compiler now issues a W-level message rather than an I-level message if attributes other than FIXED BIN(p,0) are used with REFER objects.
Some assignments to UNIONs and, more generally, to structures that contain UNIONs are now supported.
The XMLCONTENT attribute specifies that when a variable is included in the text that is generated by the XMLCHAR built-in function, it is presented as tagless text.

New or changed built-in functions, pseudovariables, and subroutines

The new ALLOC31 built-in function allocates storage of the specified size in below-the-bar heap.
The new BETWEENEXCLUSIVE, BETWEENLEFTEXCLUSIVE, and BETWEENRIGHTEXCLUSIVE built-in functions make it easier to write code that tests whether a variable is in between two specified values. These built-in functions also make it easier for the compiler to generate better code for such tests.
The new CHECKSUM built-in function can be used to get the checksum value for a buffer of data.
The new HEXDECODE and HEXDECODE8 built-in functions make it easy to translate character data that contains a hexadecimal representation of data into data with the corresponding value.
The new ICLZ built-in function provides a quick way to count the number of leading zeros in an integer value.
The new MAINNAME built-in function returns the name of the MAIN function on the current calling chain.
The new ONSUBCODE2 built-in function gives your program more information about VSAM failures.
The new PLIATTN built-in subroutine gives you explicit control over where the compiler sets attention breakpoints.
The TIMESTAMP built-in function now can be used to obtain the current date and time in the z system format of YYYY-MM-DD-HH.MI.SS.999999 .
The new UTCDATETIME and UTCSECS built-in functions can be used to obtain the UTC date and time as a string and as a number of Lilian seconds.
The new UTF8STG built-in function makes it easier to write code that parses UTF-8 text.
The new UUID built-in function can be used to obtain a universally unique identifier.

Performance improvements

Some fixed decimal divides with large precision are now done using the Decimal Floating-Point (DFP) facility. This might cause some ZERODIVIDE exceptions to be reported as INVALIDOP.

SQL enhancements

The INDFOR attribute makes it easy to declare a structure of indicator variables to match another PL/I structure.