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The gains of doing this is not worth the risk. Hence, this RFE is being rejected.
Also, there are risks if TEST is used; or if groups are passed as parameters. A section for r/o constants already exists and it is labelled as the CONSTANT area in the listing.
There are two new features of the latest COBOL standards that might be preferred over this request for a non-standard enhancement. These are "constant entries" and "constant records". Some examples:
01 my-large-literal CONSTANT 'a very large literal goes here'.
01 my-large-static-record CONSTANT RECORD.
05 field-1 VALUE 'value of field 1'.
05 field-2 VALUE 'value of field 2'.
01 my-large-static-reclen CONSTANT GLOBAL LENGTH OF my-large-static-record.
The RFE is under consideration.
Tables with Constants in Working-Storage Section are quite common in our Cobol applications and we also observe the overhead (both cpu and heap storage) when these areas are built at each enclave initialization in CICS.
This also applies to other needed constants like the more than 1000 MQ option constants from MQ copy books.
Being able to declare constant data in a cobol program should provide plenty of opportunity to the compiler to generate more efficient code. Putting the constants into the reentrant code csect would also protect the constants from being overridden in a CICS environment with RENTPROT.