- User-defined data types
A user-defined data type is defined by specifying a level-01 entry
containing the TYPEDEF clause; all entries that are subordinate to the
level-01 entry are considered part of the user-defined data type. A
user-defined data type can be used to define new data items of level-01, -77,
or -02 through -49, by specifying a TYPE clause for the new data item, that
references the user-defined data type.
- Program profiling support
The PRFDTA parameter has been added to both the CRTCBLMOD and CRTBNDCBL
commands, and to the PROCESS statement, to allow a program to be profiled for
optimization.
- Null-values support
Null-values support (by way of the NULL-MAP and NULL-KEY-MAP keywords) has
been added to the following statements and clauses to allow the manipulation
of null values in database records:
- ASSIGN clause
- COPY-DDS statement
- DELETE statement
- READ statement
- REWRITE statement
- START statement
- WRITE statement.
- Locale support
iSeries Locale objects (*LOCALE) specify certain cultural elements such as
a date format or time format. This cultural information can be
associated with ILE COBOL date, time, and numeric-edited items. The
following new characters, clauses, phrases and statements were added to
support this:
- The LOCALE clause of the SPECIAL-NAMES paragraph
- Associates an iSeries locale object with a COBOL mnemonic-name
- The LOCALE phrase of a date, time, or numeric-edited item
- Allows you to specify a locale mnemonic-name, so that the data item is
associated with an iSeries locale object
- Along with specific locales defined in the LOCALE clause of the
SPECIAL-NAMES paragraph, a current locale, and a default locale have been
defined. The current locale can be changed with the new SET LOCALE
statement (Format 8).
- A locale object is made up of locale categories, each locale category can
be changed with the SET LOCALE statement.
- Locale categories have names such as LC_TIME and LC_MONETARY. These
names include the underscore character. This character has been added
to the COBOL character set.
- The SUBSTITUTE phrase of the COPY DDS statement has been enhanced to allow
the underscore character to be brought in.
The following new intrinsic functions allow you to return
culturally-specific dates and times as character strings:
- Additions to Century support
The following enhancements have been made to the ILE COBOL Century
support:
- A new class of data items, class date-time, has been added. Class
date-time includes date, time, and timestamp categories. Date-time data
items are declared with the new FORMAT clause of the Data Description
Entry.
- Using COPY-DDS and the following values for the CVTOPT compiler parameter,
iSeries DDS data types date, time, and timestamp can be brought into COBOL
programs as COBOL date, time, and timestamp items:
- Using the CVTOPT parameter value *CVTTODATE, packed, zoned, and character
iSeries DDS data types with the DATFMT keyword can be brought into COBOL as
date items.
- The following new intrinsic functions allow you to do arithmetic on items
of class date-time, convert items to class date-time, test to make sure a
date-time item is valid, and extract part of a date-time item:
- ADD-DURATION
- CONVERT-DATE-TIME
- EXTRACT-DATE-TIME
- FIND-DURATION
- SUBTRACT-DURATION
- TEST-DATE-TIME.
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