HP 3000 Manuals HP 3000 Manuals
Overview The communications facility provided by Micro Focus COBOL enables up to 10 consoles to be connected to a single COBOL process for the purpose of sending and receiving messages. Communication between the COBOL process and the consoles is controlled by the Message Control System (MCS). The Message Control System The MCS is the logical interface between a COBOL program and the consoles to be controlled by the program. The MCS uses some facilities of the Run-time system (RTS) and the operating system. It is the MCS that checks whether there are any messages to be sent or to be received. The MCS also handles system-specific tasks, thus allowing you to create programs that are independent of any system. Before you can use the communications facilityin a COBOL program, you must specify the structures,formatsand symbolic names of the queues in which the MCS buffers messages waiting to be sent to the program or consoles. You can also specify symbolic names for the consoles. To specify these symbolic names you must set up an initialization file by using the comms program (see the section Creating an Initialization File). The names you specify in the Communication Description (CD)of the COBOL program (see your Language Reference - Additional Topics) must be names already defined to the MCS in the initialization file.