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This Idea was made available in the May 2021 Enterprise COBOL V6.3 PTF. See APAR PH35643 https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/apar/PH35643?mhsrc=ibmsearch_a&mhq=PH35643
This RFE is being accepted with some limitations. In direct contact with the RFE submitter.
This RFE is being discussed further internally. As a result, moving this RFE back to 'Under Consideration'.
Hi, unfortunately this is not just a source listing line number issue, there are many aspects to increasing the size of programs, such as internal compiler limitations and companion products such as Debug for z, APA and FA.
Also, since the V4 compiler has the same limit, we won't be accepting this as an RFE, but treat it as a defect to diagnose this and issue a warning to prevent the over-write.
As our goal by raising this requirement is simply to resolve the ambiguity that occurs when line numbers repeat - as is the case today when there are more than 999,999 lines of source in a listing, any solution that resolves that ambiguity would be acceptable we believe.
For example, the line number field in the listing could be expanded to 7 digits instead of the current limit of six digits. This would permit unambiguous line numbers for source listings containing up to 9.9 million lines of source.
Another option would be to redefine the first character of the existing six digit line number field as alphanumeric, and use the existing pattern of 0-9 for source listings that are less than 999,999 lines (identical to today's behavior) and then use alphabetic characters to represent each of the next sets of 100,000 lines. In this option, line 1,000,001 would display as "A00001", line 1,100,001 would display as "B00001" and so on. Using the letters A-Z in this fashion would allow unique identification of approximately 3.5 million lines of source in the listing.
The key here is that a solution must offer unique and unambiguous identification of each line of source in the listing. We do not anticipate a need for us to exceed 2 million lines of source for the foreseeable future so either of the above suggested alternative solutions would solve this need for us.
Line numbers are Key within a LISTING document, not only Used by other Vendor products, they as well are key in debugging purposes online just Viewing listings. please reconsider.