- User-defined data types
A user-defined data type is defined by specifying
a level-01 entry containing the TYPEDEF clause; all entries that are subordinate
to the level-01 entry are considered part of the user-defined data type. A
user-defined data type can be used to define new data items of level-01, -77,
or -02 through -49, by specifying a TYPE clause for the new data item, that
references the user-defined data type.
- Program profiling support
The PRFDTA parameter has been added to both
the CRTCBLMOD and CRTBNDCBL commands, and to the PROCESS statement, to allow
a program to be profiled for optimization.
- Null-values support
Null-values support (by way of the NULL-MAP and
NULL-KEY-MAP keywords) has been added to the following statements and clauses
to allow the manipulation of null values in database records:
- ASSIGN clause
- COPY-DDS statement
- DELETE statement
- READ statement
- REWRITE statement
- START statement
- WRITE statement.
- Locale support
iSeries Locale objects (*LOCALE) specify certain cultural
elements such as a date format or time format. This cultural information
can be associated with ILE COBOL date, time, and numeric-edited items. The following
new characters, clauses, phrases and statements were added to support this:
- The LOCALE clause of the SPECIAL-NAMES paragraph
- Associates an iSeries locale object with a COBOL mnemonic-name
- The LOCALE phrase of a date, time, or numeric-edited item
- Allows you to specify a locale mnemonic-name, so that the data item is
associated with an iSeries locale object
- Along with specific locales defined in the LOCALE clause of the SPECIAL-NAMES
paragraph, a current locale, and a default locale have been defined. The current
locale can be changed with the new SET LOCALE statement (Format 8).
- A locale object is made up of locale categories, each locale category
can be changed with the SET LOCALE statement.
- Locale categories have names such as LC_TIME and LC_MONETARY. These names
include the underscore character. This character has been added to the COBOL
character set.
- The SUBSTITUTE phrase of the COPY DDS statement has been enhanced to allow
the underscore character to be brought in.
The following new intrinsic functions allow you to return culturally-specific
dates and times as character strings:
- Additions to Century support
The following enhancements have been made
to the ILE COBOL Century support:
- A new class of data items, class date-time, has been added. Class date-time
includes date, time, and timestamp categories. Date-time data items are declared
with the new FORMAT clause of the Data Description Entry.
- Using COPY-DDS and the following values for the CVTOPT compiler parameter, iSeries DDS
data types date, time, and timestamp can be brought into COBOL programs as
COBOL date, time, and timestamp items:
- Using the CVTOPT parameter value *CVTTODATE, packed, zoned, and character iSeries DDS
data types with the DATFMT keyword can be brought into COBOL as date items.
- The following new intrinsic functions allow you to do arithmetic on items
of class date-time, convert items to class date-time, test to make sure a
date-time item is valid, and extract part of a date-time item:
- ADD-DURATION
- CONVERT-DATE-TIME
- EXTRACT-DATE-TIME
- FIND-DURATION
- SUBTRACT-DURATION
- TEST-DATE-TIME.
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