=========================================================================
M I C R O F O C U S C O B O L
V3.2.20
Running Under The Solaris 2.3 (SunOS 5.3)
Operating System Version 1
On The SPARC
=========================================================================
RELEASE NOTES
=============
TABLE OF CONTENTS
=================
INTRODUCTION
MACHINE REQUIREMENTS
PRINTED DOCUMENTATION
EARLY RELEASE FEATURES
RESTRICTIONS
ENVIRONMENT-DEPENDENT INFORMATION
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION
INTRODUCTION
============
These Release Notes (RNs) describe errors and restrictions found in the
software, and give other information not appropriate for the printed
manuals. Also, they introduce you to the on-disk documentation, which
supplements the manuals.
Where an entry arose from a problem or enhancement request that has a
reference number, the number is given, to enable Product Support to help
you more quickly when you call. These numbers are called Product
Discrepancy Report (PDR) numbers. Each group of entries has under its
heading a note of the build at which it first appeared in the Release
Notes. Entries are worded to help you recognize a problem if you come
across it; the circumstances under which a problem appears may be too
complex to describe precisely.
Additions and amendments to the manuals are given in a separate on-disk
document called the Documentation Update Notes (DUNs); its file-name
is dun.1.
MACHINE REQUIREMENTS
====================
o The Solaris 2.3 (SunOS 5.3) operating system Version 1
o SPARC
o The system utilities needed by the various phases of cob, which are
ar nm ld cc as
o At least of 5 megabytes of temporary disk space for a single user
The disk space needed increases by the combined size of the
$COBDIR/coblib/libcobol.a file and the COBOL source file for each
additional user.
The temporary disk space that a user needs can increase significantly
during SORT or MERGE operations, as these can create temporary work files
related to the size of the files being sorted or merged.
Temporary work files are put in the directory specified by the
system-defined TMPDIR environment variable. If TMPDIR is not set, the
system default temporary directory is used (as defined by the value of
P_tmpdir in stdio.h).
PRINTED DOCUMENTATION
=====================
Micro Focus COBOL V3.2 has the following printed manuals:
o Getting Started with COBOL (Issue 4, April 1993)
o COBOL User Guide (Issue 2, April 1994)
o COBOL System Reference (Issue 2, April 1994)
o COBOL Pocket Guide (Issue 7, April 1994)
o Language Reference (Issue 14, April 1994)
o Language Reference - Additional Topics (Issue 2, April 1994)
o Error Messages (Issue 10, April 1994)
o Compatibility Guide (Issue 3, April 1994)
EARLY RELEASE FEATURES
======================
Early Release features are selected features, being developed for future
Micro Focus products, which have reached a sufficiently advanced stage to
allow us to make them available to you for you to investigate. We believe
they will be of great interest and value to you in their current form.
See the on-disk document early.1 for details of these components and for
further details of Micro Focus's Early Release policy.
RESTRICTIONS
============
The following restrictions are in this release.
Compiler - Restrictions
--------------V3.2.20--
o You cannot use the BY VALUE phrase when calling a nested program.
File Handling - Restrictions
-------------------V3.2.20--
o When migrating existing applications from early versions of COBOL, it
may be necessary to rebuild indexed files. RTS error 114 ("Too many
files open simultaneously")may occur if this is not done. See your
COBOL System Reference for information on how to do this.
o The File Handler utilities do not support NLS files on the SCO UNIX
and AIX operating systems.
o In validating an indexed file, Fhvalidate checks that each key in the
index matches the key field in the corresponding data record. It does
not check that every record in the data file has a key in the index.
o When a file contained in a program or subprogram is opened and
accessed in a way that causes locks to be released, any locks held on
the physical file elsewhere in the run unit are released.
The following actions can make this happen on files defined with
manual or automatic single-record locking:
- READ
- WRITE
- REWRITE
The following actions can make this happen on files defined with
manual or automatic locking:
- UNLOCK
- COMMIT
- CLOSE
On UNIX, you can use the same_proc_excl_detection run-time tunable to
prevent a file being opened more than once in a run unit.
Screen Handling - Restrictions
---------------------V3.2.20--
o The GRID, LEFTLINE, and OVERLINE clauses are not supported on UNIX.
Screens - Restrictions
-------------V3.2.20--
o If you use a .srn file that was created using a monochrome version
of Screens with the color version, the colors may be wrong.
ENVIRONMENT-DEPENDENT INFORMATION
=================================
The following information, which on your environment supersedes the
standard information in the manuals, is newly documented at this release.
Installing - Environment-Dependent Information
-------------------------------------V3.2.20--
o All the COBOL system tools (such as the Compiler and the Generator)
are in one directory. The default path of this directory is
/opt/lib/cobol, but you can set the environment variable COBDIR to
specify a different path.
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION
=========================
The following information, supplementing that in your manuals, is newly
documented at this release.
Application Design - Supplementary Information
-------------------------------------V3.2.20--
o If a procedure pointer is set (using the SET statement) to point to a
program, and you then use it to call the program after that program
has been cancelled, results are unpredictable.
o To avoid the possibility of clashes between user-defined names and
Micro Focus COBOL symbol names, you should not start any
program-names or entry-point names with the prefixes mF_, mFt_, cob
or CBL_.
o When building an executable file which does not require any variable
length records, we recommend that you explicitly exclude the Micro
Focus variable record file handler, mFFH. You do this by adding:
-X mFFH
to your cob command line. For simple programs without any dynamic
loading, this should result in smaller executable files. If you
exclude mFFH, but a variable length record file operation is
subsequently performed at run time, you will receive run-time system
error:
107 Operation not implemented in this Run-Time System
o A program-name must not begin with "cg".
o When you do not specify a LOCK MODE IS clause for file locking,
the default locking is used. Files opened for INPUT are
shareable, files opened for OUTPUT, I-O or EXTEND are exclusive. Note
that although the default locking for relative and indexed
sequential files opened EXTEND is exclusive, this may change in
future releases of the Micro Focus COBOL product. Thus we recommend
that you explicitly specify "exclusive" in your programs for
files that you want to open EXTEND.
o The Micro Focus COBOL run-time system directly controls the terminal
to which it is attached; that is, it deals with optimizing the screen
output and handling keyboard input. Therefore, you should always
perform screen I-O using the run-time system via the ACCEPT/DISPLAY
syntax, or if using C, via the cobprintf family of calls. You should
not attempt to read or write directly to the terminal. The use of
highlighting, cursor positioning and other such terminal attributes
can be handled using the appropriate COBOL syntax. See your Language
Reference for further details.
o The limits specified in the chapter "System Limits and Programming
Restrictions" in your COBOL System Reference are set by your Micro
Focus COBOL software. However, these limits may be altered by other
limits set by your operating system. For example, the operating
system limit for the maximum number of files that can be open
simultaneously may be different from the limit set by Micro Focus
because of the maximum number of locks allowed per process, or the
maximum number of open files allowed per process. Therefore, if the
number of files allowed system-wide was large, but the number of
locks allowed was much smaller, then the limit on the number of locks
would be the limiting factor on the number files COBOL could OPEN.
For example, if your operating system limit for the number of open
relative/indexed sequential files is 97, setting the system NOFILES
limit to 128 has no effect. If you exceed your operating system
limit, the RTS error 14 "Too many files open simultaneously" is
returned.
Compiler - Supplementary Information
---------------------------V3.2.20--
o If you specify the REF and 01SHUFFLE directives and data is shuffled
to prevent a data item crossing a 64K segment boundary, the output
from the REF directive refers to the addresses of data items before
they were shuffled.
o If you try to move a nonnumeric literal to a numeric elementary item,
the Compiler will actually move zeros unless you specify the RM
Compiler directive. This also happens if you try to move one of the
nonnumeric figurative constants SPACE, LOW-VALUES or HIGH-VALUES to a
numeric elementary item.
o When you include variable length syntax in your source code, it will
have no effect on line sequential files.
o When you compile a program containing a PROGRAM-ID clause with the
OSVS directive set, the Compiler will ignore any information
following this clause until it reaches a syntactically correct
division heading. If you have misspelled the division heading
following the PROGRAM-ID clause, the Compiler will continue to ignore
any information following this heading until it reaches the next
correctly spelled division heading.
o Technical Committee X3J4 has recognized that the COBOL standard is
unclear about the meaning of ordinal numbers when specifying an
ALPHABET-NAME (other than NATIVE) in the SYMBOLIC CHARACTERS clause
of the SPECIAL-NAMES paragraph. Therefore, cross-system or upward
compatible results cannot be guaranteed.
Micro Focus recommends that you do not use the ALPHABET-NAME option
in the SYMBOLIC CHARACTERS clause if ordinal numbers are used.
Instead, you should either use literals or reference the ordinal
numbers from the native collating sequence.
o The behavior of the CANCEL statement, when it refers to an entry
point within a program, is undefined. Therefore the behavior of a
program that uses this syntax, and any program which contains an
entry point which has been cancelled, is unpredictable.
Configuration - Supplementary Information
--------------------------------V3.2.20--
o ISAM files created by this rebuilt COBOL run-time system cannot be
manipulated by the File Handler utilities provided as part of your
COBOL system.
o Your COBOL System Reference indicates that certain features of the
Micro Focus COBOL system are available only on certain types of
implementation. $COBDIR/cobver contains a Product Type Identifier
(PTI) field which identifies the type of your particular
implementation. This can be any of the following:
Kanji-EUC Your product supports Kanji using EUC coding
Kanji-SHIFTJIS Your product supports Kanji using Shift JIS coding
NLS Your product includes Native Language Support
features
FED Your product supports TI's FED features
If a PTI is shown in $COBDIR/cobver, your particular implementation
supports those features which your COBOL System Reference identifies
as supported by that type of implementation. The PTI follows the PRN,
and if more than one PTI applies to your implementation, each will
appear on a separate line.
Conversion Series 3 - Supplementary Information
--------------------------------------V3.2.20--
o Behavior in truncation of data moved to COMP-6 items differs between
Micro Focus COBOL and RM/COBOL. In Micro Focus COBOL, should
truncation occur when you move data into a COMP-6 item, the
truncation will occur according to the rules for moves to Micro Focus
COBOL COMP fields.
Conversion Series 5 - Supplementary Information
--------------------------------------V3.2.20--
o Moving LOW-VALUES to a numeric data item is not a valid operation on
the Micro Focus COBOL system. If your program attempts to do this
ZERO is moved instead.
o When running convert5, alphanumeric IDENTIFIER values must be
in quotation marks.
Enhanced ACCEPT/DISPLAY - Supplementary Information
------------------------------------------V3.2.20--
o If you specify a group item in the Screen Section with a LINE or
COLUMN clause (at any level of the hierarchy), you must specify
at least one elementary item with a VALUE clause or a USING/FROM/TO
clause. Otherwise your program may hang.
File Handling - Supplementary Information
--------------------------------V3.2.20--
o If a program uses Adis ACCEPT and DISPLAY statements, you cannot
redirect its input from a file other than a terminal. For example,
the following redirection is legal:
cobrun prog < `tty` > `tty`
whereas redirecting the input from an ordinary file or the null file
(/etc/null) is not legal and could result in a run-time error.
o If the records in a file are compressed (with the DATACOMPRESS
directive) or the file is variable format, Fhinfo always returns -1
as the number of records in the file.
o Programs compiled with the OSVS, VSC2, DOSVS or COBOL370 directive,
when opening a variable-length file, do not perform minimum record
length checking. This is true when using ISAM files or relative
or sequential files using Extfh.
o If you receive an undocumented error during a file operation, you
must recode your application so that it uses file status bytes. You
must then check the file status bytes for the exact error.
File-names - Supplementary Information
-----------------------------V3.2.20--
Printing - Supplementary Information
---------------------------V3.2.20--
o ASSIGN TO PRINTER does not send output to a printer; it sends it to
LPT1 instead. In order to send output to a physical printer you must
use the dd_LPT1 environment variable. If your system supports the lp
printer spooler you should use:
dd_LPT1=">lp";export dd_LPT1
Windowing Syntax - Supplementary Information
-----------------------------------V3.2.20--
o If you COPY a file into a program, the windowing subsystem will not
use the OSEXT directive or append the default extension .cbl onto the
file. This means that the file-name in your program must be identical
to the file-name on the disk in order for the COPY to be successful.
o The windowing subsystem does not support the COBCPY environment
variable to locate COPY files.
You should link your COPY files to the current directory.
o The Windows emulation under OS/2 2.0 emulates Microsoft Windows 3.0;
The Workbench Desktop cannot run on this version of Microsoft
Windows. Under OS/2 2.1, the emulation is of Microsoft Windows 3.1;
the Workbench Desktop does run on this.
X/OPEN Portability - Supplementary Information
-------------------------------------V3.2.20--
o When invoking COBOL from C in conjunction with the X/Open syntax
ACCEPT FROM ARGUMENT-VALUE, argc and argv will not be passed from the
command line to the COBOL program.
=========================================================================
Micro Focus and Animator are registered trademarks of Micro Focus
Limited.
Micro Focus COBOL and Micro Focus COBOL Toolbox are trademarks of Micro
Focus Limited.
IBM is a registered trademark of International Business Machines
Corporation.
SCO is a trademark of The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.
Informix is a registered trademark of Informix Software, Inc.
C-ISAM is a trademark of Informix Software, Inc.
RM/COBOL is a registered trademark of Ryan-McFarland Corporation.
X/Open is a trademark of the X/Open Company Limited.
UNIX is a registered trademark of UNIX System Laboratories, Inc.
=========================================================================
@(#)Vrn/main.1/3.2.00/29Mar94/nrV
Copyright (C) 1992-94 Micro Focus Limited