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Status Delivered
Workspace COBOL Compilers
Created by Guest
Created on May 1, 2016

RELATED IDEAS

Enterprise Cobol V6 - Direct support for UNBOUNDED table in ALLOCATE and FREE statements

The ALLOCATE and FREE Enterprise Cobol V6 statements are not directly usable for structures containing an UNBOUNDED table.

We suggest extension syntax to ALLOCATE and FREE statements.


ALLOCATE arithmetic-expression-1 CHARACTERS [INITIALIZED] RETURNING ADDRESS OF data-name-1

- data-name-1 must be declared in the LINKAGE SECTION
- data-name-1 cannot be a variable defined with USAGE POINTER
- data-name-1 address is set on the address of the allocated memory block
- data-name-1 can be initialized; If data-name-1 contains an UNBOUNDED table, initialization is done in accordance to the allocated memory size


FREE data-name-1

- data-name-1 can be a structure declared in the LINKAGE SECTION


In connection with our RFE 87660 :

RESIZE data-name-1 FOR numeric-expression CHARACTERS { INITIALIZED | [NO] PRESERVE }

- data-name-1 must be declared in the LINKAGE SECTION
- data-name-1 cannot be a variable defined with USAGE POINTER
- data-name-1 must contains an UNBOUNDED table
- data-name-1 address is set on the address of the newly allocated memory block
- data-name-1 can be re-initialized, initialization is done in accordance to the newly allocated memory size

Idea priority Medium
  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Oct 2, 2017

    The V6.x docs have been updated with an example:
    The example has been added to the Language Reference (see Procedure Division -> ALLOCATE statement -> Example: ALLOCATE and FREE storage for UNBOUNDED tables

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Jun 21, 2016

    It is worth noting that UNBOUNDED tables themselves are not supported by the COBOL Standard. Therefore declining a requirement based on that is spurious at best.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     May 19, 2016

    This is also not part of the COBOL Standard. Instead, this RFE will be used to update our documentation to show how this can be done with current compiler syntax.

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