Enterprise COBOL - Capacity to exclude line comments from LISTING and MDECK

Hi,

As explained in requests COBOLVUE-I-319 and COBOLVUE-I-352, we want to be able to exclude certain comment lines both from the compilation Listing but also in the expanded source produced by the MDECK compilation option.

The *CONTROL NOSOURCE option allows you to exclude lines in the resulting Listing, (not only comments), but is not taken into account by the MDECK compilation option: the lines are included in the expanded source.

We could use conditional compilation by using a dedicated variable and testing it with a >>if / >>endif to exclude lines, at the source code level before compilation, therefore applicable to the expanded source created by the MDECK compilation option , and consequently also at the level of the compilation Listing, but this seems dangerous to us because in this case we are not only excluding comment lines.

I renew and reformulate my request COBOLVUE-I-319 to have an option to exclude comment lines, and only comment lines, both in the expanded source created by the MDECK compilation option, but also in the Listing compilation.

For this I propose to combine a new conditional compilation directive, which would be >>*, with the CONDCOMP compilation option:

• CONDCOMP(NOSKIPSRC): the comment line directive >>* is included in the expanded source and in the listing

• CONDCOMP(SKIPSRC): comment line directive >>* is excluded from the expanded source and the Listing

Use case: online documentation of a Development Framework (explanatory comments in the Framework copybooks) which is not useful in a compilation Listing nor in the expanded source and which only unnecessarily overloads them.

Thanks.