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by Walter Murray Support Technology Lab
Overview
COBOL II/iX on MPE/iX 6.0 provides several enhancements that were requested by
Interex SIGCOBOL. Some of these enhancements have already been made available
in various patches to MPE/iX 5.5.
This article gives an overview. For details, refer to "COBOL II/iX
Enhancements" in chapter 10, "Technical Articles."
- COBOL now provides the ability to specify secondary entry points in a
main program. The ENTRY statement, which was previously allowed
only in subprograms, may now be used in the main program. The nonnumeric
literal specified in the ENTRY statement becomes the name of a
secondary entry point for the program, and it can be specified in the
MPE/iX RUN command.
- Support is now provided for procedure call by plabel. In a CALL
statement, the identifier designating the subprogram to be called may
now be the name of a numeric data item. It will be interpreted as a
procedure label of a previously loaded procedure, and the compiler will
generate a dynamic call to that procedure.
- Six new procedures have been added to the run-time library to simplify
bit manipulation in COBOL.
- Compiler limits were increased to permit compiling much larger programs,
such as those created by automated code generation tools. COBOL II/iX
should now be able to compile programs in excess of 200,000 lines of
source code.
- An index-name may now be used as the operand of a DISPLAY
statement.
- Attempting to compile a source file in Qedit format, on a system where
Qedit is not properly installed, will now result in a specific error
message suggesting a problem related to Qedit. Qedit is a full-screen
text editor from Robelle Consulting Ltd.
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