MVS COBOL versus AS/400 Cobol

[Guest.Visitor]

On Tuesday, January 05, 1999, 04:46 PM, Kevin Murphy wrote: I am now in the process of taking the AS/400 Cobol class. I have mainly coded Cobol for the mainframe. Would like to know if someone can tell me the main differences between the two. Any help greatly appreciated. Thanks <HR><PRE>Your really big differences between Cobol/400 and CICS/COBOL is inthe file section of data div. Also, after a screen write the systemtakes care of things until a function key is hit .The way the screen map is built is neater than that monstrosity inCICS. It's an online builder...There are some extra data types... What would really be interesting, in a couple of years you can writea book: "COBOL/400 for CICS Dummies" . On second thought, someone has prolly did it a'ready. Anyway please keep us posted!!!!......</pre> <pre> <H4>Bob Hamilton TEXAS BUSINESS SYSTEMS 736 Pinehurst Richardson, Texas 75080 <h4> </pre></h4></h4>

[Guest.Visitor]

Date Format often is defaulted to *JOB for some interfaces, but the job does not support a *ISO setting. For CRTSQLCBL you can specify DATFMT(*JOB) and from STRSQL the same parameter; for the latter, F13=Services and then change session attributes to change the date format for an existing session. Also in SQL the CHAR function's second parameter when a date is the first parameter, supports ISO to return a date as a character value formatted as ISO. HTH. Regards, Chuck Comments provided "as is" with no warranties of any kind whatsoever.

[Guest.Visitor]

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that, for the most part, random reads and updates work like VSAM. There a file status field, just like VSAM, and the return codes are even the same (i.e. 00=good, 10=EOF, etc). The best difference is that the key fields do not have to be contiguous the way they must be with VSAM.

[nycsusan@hotmail.com]

I too started with COBOL on the mainframe before migrating to doing (mostly) COBOL on the AS/400. There are several subtle differences. I remember wasting a lot of time trying to debug an AS/400 COBOL program while using a mainframe COBOL IBM manual. The discrepancy was whether a move was right or left justified when moving a smaller field into a larger field. I forget which was left justfied and which one was right justfied, but I do remember the AS/400 COBOL behaving differently than the mainframe COBOL manual described. The moral of the story is to always use a real AS/400 COBOL manual, and not a mainframe COBOL manual!