Planning to upgrade source programs

You can follow a general strategy for upgrading source programs to Enterprise COBOL.

For programs that were compiled with OS/VS COBOL or with VS COBOL II through IBM® COBOL with the CMPR2 compiler option, source changes will be necessary before recompiling with Enterprise COBOL V5 or V6. If you have such programs, you can follow a general strategy for upgrading source programs to Enterprise COBOL.
Note: If your programs were compiled with NOCMPR2 or with Enterprise COBOL V3 or V4, no source changes will be necessary (in most cases) to compile with Enterprise COBOL V5 or V6. Go to the appropriate chapters in the "Upgrading programs" part of this manual.

The following tasks are necessary, and should be performed in roughly the following order:

  1. Preparing to upgrade your source
  2. Taking an inventory of your applications
  3. Prioritizing your applications
  4. Setting up a conversion procedure
  5. Making application program updates

Because of the loss of service support for older COBOL compilers, you should eventually upgrade all of your COBOL source programs. Although this is not an immediate requirement, at some future date the older compilers and any supported fixes will not be available. At that point, you will be forced to do a 'quick' migration, and this might be at a very inconvenient time.