HP 3000 Manuals HP 3000 Manuals
Illegal ASCII Digit Error Handling by Julia Rodriguez--Information Technology Group COBOL II/XL/XL A.00.14 has new options to allow greater compatibility with the COBOL II/V handling of illegal data. Leading blanks and wrong signs are two special cases of the Illegal ASCII/Decimal Digit Trap. COBOL II/XL been enhanced to allow correction of these two cases of the trap without issuing a message, while continuing to allow the programmer to get a message for other instances of illegal digits. These two options allow the user to obtain the MPE/V functionality while also retaining the new functionality offered by COBRUNTIME. It should be noted that there is a small impact on program size and possibly a large impact on performance by using traps to correct illegal data. To avoid this performance degradation, the source code should instead be changed to check numeric fields for illegal data and correct them. For more details refer to Illegal ASCII Digit Error Handling in the TECHNICAL ARTICLES section.