Migration and Development

If you are migrating programs from Pro*COBOL 1.x to 8.x or later, you should be aware of the following:

• Within the Data Division:
  • You should terminate all SQL statements with a period
  • Only ANSI comments are supported. Comments starting with *> in any column are not supported
• Support for nested programs

  Define all inserted variables as GLOBAL including the data items inserted by COBSQL that support the EBCDIC to ASCII conversions.

• Oracle 8 no longer requires a declare section as this can cause problems with the Oracle COMP to COMP-5 conversion.

  If the Oracle directive DECLARE_SECTION=NO is set (the default), Oracle converts all COMP, BINARY or COMP-4 data items to COMP-5.

  To limit the conversion of items to the declare section, set one of the following:

  • DECLARE_SECTION=YES or MODE=ANSI
  • The Pro*COBOL directive COMP5=NO and the COBSQL directive MAKESYN
• Extra data types supported by Pro*COBOL 8.x or later are:
  • PACKED-DECIMAL

    These data items are treated in the same way as COMP-3 data items.

  • COMP-4
  • PIC 9(4) COMP / COMP-4 / BINARY / COMP-5
  • PIC 9(4) USAGE DISPLAY
  • PIC s9(4) USAGE DISPLAY SIGN TRAILING
  • PIC s9(4) USAGE DISPLAY SIGN TRAILING SEPARATE
  • PIC s9(4) USAGE DISPLAY SIGN LEADING
  • PIC s9(4) USAGE DISPLAY SIGN LEADING SEPARATE

    This type was previously supported as the Oracle DISPLAY datatype.

• When working on x86 or x86-64 platforms, do not use the COBSQL directive NOMAKESYN, since this directive results in COMP host variables and on x86 and x86-64 platforms these items are incompatible with the native byte order expected by Oracle.