Micro Focus Object COBOL™

Compatibility Guide

MERANT™

Issue 5a
August 1999

Copyright © 1999 MERANT International Limited. All rights reserved.
This document and the proprietary marks and names used herein are protected by international law.

MERANT has made every effort to ensure that this manual is correct and accurate, but reserves the right to make changes without notice at its sole discretion at any time.

The software described in this document is supplied under a license and may be used or copied only in accordance with the terms of such license, and in particular any warranty of fitness of MERANT software products for any particular purpose is expressly excluded and in no event will MERANT be liable for any consequential loss.

Micro Focus® and Animator® are registered trademarks, and Object COBOL™, Micro Focus COBOL™, VS COBOL™, LEVEL II COBOL™ and Professional COBOL™ are trademarks, of MERANT International Limited.

IBM® and OS/2® are registered trademarks, and IBM COBOL/2™ and Systems Application Architecture™ are trademarks, of International Business Machines Corporation

Microsoft® and MS-DOS® are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.

Data General® and DG COBOL® are registered trademarks of Data General Corporation.

RM/COBOL® is a registered trademark of Ryan-McFarland Corporation.

UNIX® is a registered trademark licensed exclusively by X/Open Company Limited.

Preface

This COBOL system supports many dialects of COBOL. This guide describes how to migrate applications from other COBOL systems to run with this COBOL system.

The final part of this guide provides lists for each dialect covering the features supported by this system, historical details of when the support was first provided and the system directives required for compatibility.

This COBOL system supports the COBOL language described in your Language Reference and Language Reference - Additional Topics.

Audience

The aim of this Guide is to enable you to migrate from any of these environments:

IBM OS/VS COBOL
IBM VS COBOL II
Microsoft COBOL V2.2
RM/COBOL
DG Interactive COBOL

to this COBOL environment. It is intended to be used by users who want to:

convert applications written in the selected COBOL language to the Micro Focus COBOL language, and to enhance them using the advanced language and development features offered by this COBOL system
retain the use of the selected COBOL on some machine environments while moving to this COBOL environment on others. If you fall into this category you will want to maintain a common set of source programs which are suitable for all environments
convert the selected COBOL formatted files to the file format used with this system. It is assumed that you are familiar with the COBOL language, and have access to the documents listed in the section Related Publications below.

Any error messages and numbers that may be returned when you submit your program to this COBOL system or when you execute the resulting code are different in the two environments. This should present no problems, but is something of which you should be aware.

Related Publications

This manual is designed to be used in conjunction with the following manuals which are also supplied with your system:

Object COBOL User Guide

Language Reference

Language Reference - Additional Topics

Error Messages

Programmer's Guide to Creating User Interfaces

Programmer's Guide to File Handling

Programmer's Guide to Writing programs

For Conversion Series 5, you must also have access to revision 2 of The Data General Interactive COBOL Programmer's Reference Manual.

Notation in this Manual

When items are enclosed in braces { }, you may choose one and only one of the items in the braces.
When items are enclosed in square brackets [ ], you may choose one of the items in the brackets or none of the items.
Running headers contain the title of the chapter and the running footer contains the title of the publication.
The page number is composed of two numbers: the first is the chapter number and the second is the page in the chapter.
Throughout this manual, system directives and their parameters are shown in the following format:
```
directive"parameter" 
```
UNIX:
Under the UNIX operating system, you must enclose the entire parameter string in quotation marks, for example:
```
"NOMF RM"ANSI" REMOVE"COL""
```
See your Object COBOL User Guide for details of the format of directives applicable to your system.

About this Manual

This manual is split into a number of parts. Each part covers particular areas of compatibility.

Part 1 - Conversion Series 1 - IBM/370 Mainframe Compatibility

This part describes how you can configure your COBOL system to allow you to process IBM/370 programs (that is, programs written in IBM VS COBOL II and OS/VS COBOL) directly. It also lists difficulties that you may encounter when migrating IBM/370 mainframe programs to this COBOL system.

Part 2 - Conversion Series 2 - Microsoft COBOL V2.2

This part describes how you can configure your COBOL system to allow you to process Microsoft COBOL Version 2.2 programs directly. It also lists difficulties that you may encounter when you use your Microsoft COBOL Version 2.2 programs on this COBOL system.

Included in this part is a description of the REBUILD utility which, when invoked, will enable you to convert files from the Microsoft COBOL Version 2.2 format to this COBOL format.

Part 3 - Conversion Series 3 - RM/COBOL V2

This part describes how you can use this COBOL system to process Version 2 RM/COBOL source programs directly. It also lists difficulties that you may encounter when you use your RM/COBOL Version 2 programs on this COBOL system.

This part also describes the Convert3 files conversion utility, which converts data files created by RM/COBOL programs into data files that can be accessed by the same programs under this COBOL system.

Part 4 - Conversion Series 5 - DG Interactive COBOL

This part describes how you can use this COBOL system to process DG Interactive COBOL source programs directly. It also lists difficulties that you may encounter when you use your DG Interactive COBOL programs on this COBOL system.

This part also describes the use of a pair of utilities:

Reform5, which reformats a DG Interactive COBOL source code program so it can be submitted to this COBOL system.
Convert5, which converts data files created by DG Interactive COBOL programs into data files that can be accessed by the same programs once they have been reformatted to the datafile format used with this COBOL system.