Changes in IBM® Enterprise COBOL for z/OS® and OS/390®, Version 3 Release 1

  • Multithreading support: toleration of POSIX threads and signals, permitting applications with COBOL programs to run on multiple threads within a process
  • Interoperation of COBOL and Java™ by means of object-oriented syntax, permitting COBOL programs to instantiate Java classes, invoke methods on Java objects, and define Java classes that can be instantiated in Java or COBOL and whose methods can be invoked in Java or COBOL
  • Ability to call services provided by the Java Native Interface (JNI) to obtain additional Java capabilities, with a copybook JNI.cpy and special register JNIENVPTR to facilitate access
  • Basic support for Unicode provided by NATIONAL data type and national (N, NX) literals, intrinsic functions DISPLAY-OF and NATIONAL-OF for character conversions, and compiler options NSYMBOL and CODEPAGE
    • Compiler option CODEPAGE to specify the code page used for encoding national literals, and alphanumeric and DBCS data items and literals
    • Compiler option NSYMBOL to control whether national or DBCS processing should be in effect for literals and data items that use the N symbol
  • Basic XML support, including a high-speed XML parser that allows programs to consume inbound XML messages, verify that they are well formed, and transform their contents into COBOL data structures; with support for XML documents encoded in Unicode UTF-16 or several single-byte EBCDIC code pages
  • Support for compilation of programs that contain CICS® statements, without the need for a separate translation step
    • Compiler option CICS, enabling integrated CICS translation and specification of CICS options
  • VALUE clauses for BINARY data items that permit numeric literals to have a value of magnitude up to the capacity of the native binary representation, rather than being limited to the value implied by the number of 9s in the PICTURE clause
  • A 4-byte FUNCTION-POINTER data item that can contain the address of a COBOL or non-COBOL entry point, providing easier interoperability with C function pointers
  • The following support is no longer provided (as documented in this Migration Guide):
    • SOM-based object-oriented syntax and services
    • Compiler options CMPR2, ANALYZE, FLAGMIG, TYPECHK, and IDLGEN
  • Changed default values for the following compiler options: DBCS, FLAG(I,I), RENT, and XREF(FULL).