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Status Not under consideration
Workspace COBOL Compilers
Created by Guest
Created on Feb 8, 2021

RELATED IDEAS

Option to have spaces treated as zeros at Runtime

Our COBOL V6 migration has been painful and slow. Much of this due to 'invalid data'.
The biggest pain for our applications folks are when copy books and linkage areas initialized to spaces at the 01 level. To code around this in V6 is a lot of extra work. It's often not an option to 'fix' the copybook as many are shared between multiple applications and programs.
They would like an option to specify the runtime treat spaces (x'40') or low values as a zero instead of blowing up on NUMCHECK.
Ideally they'd like V6 to work like V4 but that's not going to happen - giving an option for space and/or low value to be treated as zero would speed up development and assist in migration to V6. This has been the biggest challenge.

Idea priority High
  • Guest
    Reply
    |     May 11, 2021

    Discussions have been going on with the RFE submitter directly and we have decided to implement a different approach (ie not the one outlined in this RFE). As a result, we are rejecting this specific RFE.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Feb 17, 2021

    This is being discussed further internally.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Feb 11, 2021

    I disagree with this proposal.
    That would be starting to allow anything in the treatment of digital areas.
    Note that with the NONUMCHECK option, spaces are considered as zeros (unfortunately).

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Feb 9, 2021

    Hi SkiDreamer

    I cannot vote for this issue, as I see this as a clear program error, and not something that should be fixed using options.
    If you want to, it is possible to run 6.3 and have it treat spaces as zeroes.
    Remove the numcheck, numproc and zonedata options, and that should fix it.

    The right fix here should be, to initialise ws-stuff, instead of moving spaces to it.
    That will move zeroes to the number instead of spaces.

    And you are not the only one struggling with these options.
    Our solution was to make it so that only programs that are tested to work with the options, use them in production.
    I'm guessing we have less than 5% of all programs running the best options for 6.3.

    Regards,
    Rune

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