HP 3000 Manuals

COMMUNICATOR 3000/XL

Chapter 7  TECHNICAL ARTICLES 

COBOL II/XL 

by Shailesh Patel--Information Technology Group 

The following should be taken into consideration when using COBOL II/XL
compiler version A.00.13 and later.

 *  The operating system has changed the intrinsics declarations for
    SORT, MERGE and intrinsics HPMYPROGRAM and HPGETPROCPLABEL, which are
    used for dynamic calling of subprograms.  If your COBOL program uses
    any of the features listed below, the programs must be recompiled
    before trying to run the existing programs on operating system
    release A.01.10 :

         -  SORT/MERGE COBOL statements
         -  CALL IDENTIFIER COBOL statements
         -  CALL INTRINSIC COBOL statements

 *  Much work has been done to allow the HP COBOL II/XL compiler to
    produce the best possible code without optimization.  For example,
    special millicode was written especially for COBOL to provide for
    efficient decimal and character moves, calculations and comparisons.
    This millicode is invoked in a manner invisible to the programmer.

 *  Level one optimization is provided for those programs that use the
    cpu intensively and do very little I/O. Improvements even for these
    programs will be modest.  For more information on the improvements
    provided by the optimizer, as well as hints on writing efficient
    programs see Chapter 3 of the HP COBOL II/XL Programmer's Guide (P/N
    31500-90002).

 *  The operating system does not give stack trace, when a program
    aborts.  Also it does not print the Escape code.  Because of this,
    the errors in the intrinsics are not clear and difficult to
    understand.  We recommend the following workaround to get meaningful
    information for the errors:

         - :SETDUMP DEBUG="wl 'Escape code = ',escapecode;wl;tr;c"

    This command will tell the NMDEBUG to print the escape code, and the
    stack trace.

 *  The command files to use COBOL II/XL compiler have been changed to
    use Master file and Work file.  The changes will affect the job files
    which use positional parameters for the info strings.  The following
    command, for example:

            :COB85XL source,,,"$control map"

    will now have to be changed to not use the positional parameter as:

            :COB85XL source;info="$control map"

    This change applies to all the six command files, namely

            COB85XL, COB85XLK, COB85XLG, COB74XL, COB74XLK, COB74XLG.

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