HP 3000 Manuals

COBOL/HP-UX Operating Guide for the Series 700 and 800

Overview 

The communications facility provided by Micro Focus COBOL allows 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 facility 
in a COBOL program, you must specify the structures, 
formats 
and symbolic namesof 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) must be names already
defined to the MCS in the initialization file.

MPE/iX 5.0 Documentation