HP 3000 Manuals

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

The RM Directive 

By default, the standard COBOL language supported by this system, as
documented in your Language Reference, already supports much of the
RM/COBOL syntax and behavior.  There is some additional RM/COBOL syntax,
however, which you can enable using the RM system directive.  Setting the
RM directive when you submit your RM/COBOL source programs to this COBOL
system, ensures that most of the programs are accepted the first time
they are submitted.  The additional syntax enabled by the RM directive is
documented in your Language Reference.

If you normally set the ANSI switch when you submit your RM/COBOL source
programs to the RM/COBOL system, you must specify the ANSI parameter with
the RM directive when you submit these programs to this COBOL system.

See your COBOL System Reference for the commands you use to submit your
RM/COBOL source programs to this COBOL system, and to set the RM
directive.

Note that setting the RM directive automatically sets additional system
directives, namely SPZERO, NO TRUNC, OLDINDEX, NO OPTIONAL-FILE,
RETRYLOCK, ALIGN(2) and SEQUENTIAL (LINE). See your COBOL System 
Reference for details of these directives.  The system will also behave
as if you had specified the following syntax:

     SIGN TRAILING SEPARATE

for signed numeric data-items, and:

     LOCK MODE IS AUTOMATIC

for each file in the program which has no explicit locking syntax
declared.  When you set the RM directive with the ANSI parameter, the
same system directives are set as for the RM directive, except that the
SEQUENTIAL directive is set as SEQUENTIAL (RECORD). Also, the system
behaves as if you had specified the syntax:

     SIGN TRAILING INCLUDED

for signed numeric data-items, and:

     LOCK MODE IS AUTOMATIC

for each file in the program which has no explicit locking syntax
declared.

We also recommend that you set the NO MF and NO OSVS directives when you
submit your RM/COBOL source programs to this COBOL system.  This ensures
that only those words which are treated as reserved words under the ANSI
'74 COBOL standard are regarded as reserved words by this COBOL system.
For further details of these directives, see your COBOL System Reference.

Setting the NO RM directive disables the syntax enabled when the RM
directive was set, and automatically resets the additional system
directives to NO SPZERO, TRUNC(ANSI), NO OLDINDEX, OPTIONAL-FILE, NO
RETRYLOCK, ALIGN(8) and SEQUENTIAL (RECORD). Additionally, the system
behaves as if you had specified the syntax:

     SIGN TRAILING INCLUDED

for signed numeric data-items, and:

     LOCK MODE IS EXCLUSIVE

for each file in the program which has no explicit locking syntax
declared.  See your COBOL System Reference for details of the default
setting of the RM directive.  Note that the final states of the
additional directives set when you use the NO RM directive are not
necessarily the same as their initial default states.

MPE/iX 5.0 Documentation