Rational Developer for System z
Enterprise COBOL for z/OS, Version 4.1, Programming Guide


Summary of changes

This section lists the key changes that have been made to Enterprise COBOL in Version 4. The changes that are described in this document have an associated cross-reference for your convenience. The latest technical changes are marked by a vertical bar (|) in the left margin in the PDF and BookManager versions.

Version 4 Release 1 (December 2007)

  • The performance of operations on Unicode (USAGE NATIONAL) data has been significantly improved. The compiler now generates z/Architecture® hardware instructions for most Unicode MOVE operations and comparisons.
  • A new compiler option, XMLPARSE, makes it possible to choose between parsing with the parser that is available with the COBOL library (for compatibility with Enterprise COBOL Version 3) or with the z/OS XML System Services parser (XMLPARSE).
  • New XML PARSE capabilities are available when you parse a document with the z/OS XML System Services parser (Processing XML input):
    • Namespaces and namespace prefixes are processed using new special registers and new XML events.
    • You can specify the document encoding using the ENCODING phrase of the XML PARSE statement.
    • You can parse documents that are encoded in Unicode UTF-8 (Parsing XML documents encoded in UTF-8).
    • The RETURNING NATIONAL phrase enables you to receive XML document fragments in Unicode regardless of the original encoding of an XML document.
    • You can parse documents that reside in a data set or parse very large documents a buffer at a time (Parsing XML documents one segment at a time).
  • The XML GENERATE statement has been enhanced (Producing XML output):
    • You can specify a namespace using the NAMESPACE phrase, and a namespace prefix to be applied to each element using the NAMESPACE-PREFIX phrase.
    • You can specify the code page of the generated document using the ENCODING phrase (Controlling the encoding of generated XML output).
    • XML documents can now be generated in UTF-8 as well as in UTF-16 or various EBCDIC code pages.
    • The WITH ATTRIBUTES phrase causes eligible elementary items to be expressed as attributes rather than as child elements in the generated XML.
    • The WITH XML-DECLARATION phrase causes an XML declaration to be generated.
  • A new compiler option, OPTFILE, enables the specifying of COBOL compiler options from within a data set (OPTFILE).
  • Compiler listings now cross-reference COPY statements and the data sets from which copybooks are obtained (Example: XREF output: COPY/BASIS cross-references).
  • Support for new features of DB2® for z/OS V9 is enabled when you use the integrated DB2 coprocessor (SQL compiler option) (DB2 coprocessor):
    • New SQL data types are supported: XML types, BINARY, VARBINARY, BIGINT, and file reference variables.
    • New SQL syntax for XML manipulation, enhancements to large object manipulation, MERGE, and SELECT FROM MERGE is supported.
    • DB2 processing options STDSQL(YES|NO), NOFOR, and SQL(ALL|DB2) are supported as suboptions to the SQL compiler option (Compiling with the SQL option).
  • Several usability enhancements to COBOL-DB2 applications are available when you use the integrated DB2 coprocessor:
    • The compiler listing is enhanced to show the DB2 options in effect (if you use DB2 for z/OS V9) and to show the expansion of the SQLCA and SQLDA control blocks.
    • You can specify an alternate ddname for DBRMLIB when you invoke the compiler from an assembler language program (Starting the compiler from an assembler program).
    • An explicitly coded LOCAL-STORAGE SECTION or WORKING-STORAGE SECTION is no longer required.
  • Debugging has been enhanced to support Debug Tool V8. A new suboption of the TEST compiler option, EJPD, enables the Debug Tool commands JUMPTO and GOTO for production debugging. The TEST compiler option has been simplified and has restructured suboptions (TEST).

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