Summary of changes
This section lists the key changes that have been made to IBM COBOL for Windows. The changes
that are described in this document have an associated cross-reference for your
convenience. The technical changes with respect to Version 6 are marked by a revision bar in the
left margin in the PDF version.
Version 7 (December 2006)
These terminology changes were also made in this release:
- The term alphanumeric group is introduced to refer
specifically to groups other than national groups.
- The term group means both alphanumeric groups and national
groups except when used in a context that obviously refers to only an
alphanumeric group or only a national group.
- The term external decimal refers to both zoned decimal
items and national decimal items.
- The term display floating point is introduced to refer to
an external floating-point item that has USAGE DISPLAY.
- The term external floating point refers to both display
floating-point items and national floating-point items.
Version 6 (May 2005)
- Several limits on COBOL data-item size have been significantly raised (Describing the data). For example:
- The maximum data-item size has been raised to 2,147,483,646 bytes.
- The maximum PICTURE symbol replication has been raised to
2,147,483,646.
- The maximum OCCURS integer has been raised to 2,147,483,646.
This support facilitates programming with large amounts of data, for
example:
- DB2/COBOL applications that use DB2 BLOB and CLOB data types
- COBOL XML applications that parse or generate large XML documents
For full details about changed compiler limits, see Compiler limits
(COBOL for Windows Language Reference).
- A compiler option MDECK, which specifies that output from library
processing is written to a file, has been added (MDECK).
- A cob2 option, -s, which affects the amount of stack
space that the linker allocates, has been added (cob2 options).
- CICS Transaction Server is no longer supported.
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