What’s new in COBOL for z/OS since V4.2 Tom Ross February 1, 2017

What’s new since V4.2? From V5.1: COBOL 2002: Floating comment delimiter *> to end of line is a comment Raise WORKING-STORAGE section size limit to 2GB (from 128MB) Larger individual data items Up to 999,999,999 bytes! Support for UNBOUNDED tables X OCCURS 1 To UNBOUNDED Depending on Y. LINKAGE SECTION only Improved interface with IBM Debug Tool Easier management of debugging info

What’s new since V4.2? From V5.2: Improved XML GENERATE More powerful SUPPRESS capabilities New VOLATILE attribute and SERVICE LABEL functionality Enable OPT(1|2) compilation of User-Written condition handlers >>CALLINTERFACE directive Enables local control of dynamic, static, DLL calls New features from 2002 COBOL Standard Plus a list in the Language Reference Manual of which parts are supported

What’s new since V4.2? From V5.2: New features from 2002 COBOL Standard: Format 2 of SORT: the table SORT statement Arranges table elements in a user-specified sequence Can be used in CICS! New formats of EXIT statement: EXIT SECTION EXIT PARAGRAPH EXIT PERFORM EXIT PERFORM CYCLE Improved COPY REPLACING statement LEADING and TRAILING phrases (better partial word replacement) Nested COPY REPLACING now supported (IBM Extension) Improved REPLACE statement

What’s new since V4.2? From V6.1: Improved compiler capacity to allow compilation and optimization of very large COBOL programs Very large means >400,000 lines COBOL 2002: ALLOCATE and FREE statements COBOL 2002: INITIALIZE … TO VALUE and more! Re-set data items to initial value from VALUE clause! JSON GENERATE statement New and modified compiler options COBOL 2002: VSAM "0x" file status code For current cases that get FS=97 Improved memory requirements of TABLE SORT and performance improvements