John Ehrman, all

Below is the announcement of the last release of z390 and zcobol that I
personally plan to publish.  I would like to take this opportunity to thank
John Ehrman for his gracious hospitality as chair of the SHARE Assembler
Project for inviting me to speak at SHARE about the development of z390 and
zcobol.  You can find the SHARE presentations here:

http://www.z390.org/z390_SHARE_Assembler_and_Emulator_Presentations.htm

Here is the announcement of z390 v1.5.06 release:

All

z390 v1.5.06 Full Release is now available for download along with optional
download files here:

http://www.z390.org/#Download_Links

For details on all the fixes and enhancements since the last full release of
z390 see the archive file here:

http://www.z390.org/z390_Download_Archive.htm

Major enhancements include:

1. The z390.jar runtime application file was build using J2SE 1.6.0_31
so it will run with both 1.6+ and 1.7+ J2SE host systems. It has also been
updated to support J2SE Vendors Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and Apple and has
been tested on Windows 7 x64/Vista/xp, Ubuntu Linux, and Apple OSX host
systems.

2. zCICS V11 contributed by Melvyn Maltz includes new channel support
and includes both EXEC CICS assembler and EXEC CICS zcobol transactions
which can run on zCICS TN3270 type terminal sessions on any TCP/IP network
connected to the host zCICS server supporting J2SE multiple sockets
connections.

3. zcobol has been enhanced to support COMPUTE statements with 15
different data field types including HFP, BFP, DFP, F, G, H, P, Q, and Z
type fields with implied decimals. A new demo has been added in
zcobol\demo\callcomp directory. This demo shows how a zcobol subroutine can
be called from an assembler program to take advantage of the power of the
COMPUTE statement to generate source assembler with data labels for complex
arithmetic expressions. A number of new regression tests have also been
added in zcobol\test and can be run with the command ZCRTTEST.BAT.

4. Add new option THREAD/NOTHREAD for compatibility with HLASM
controlling whether assembler listing addresses start over for each CSECT.

Major corrections include:

1. Correct macro assembler to not convert macro parameters with leading
minus signs to negative numeric values when referenced in SETA statements
for HLASM compatibility. This can be overridden using ALLOW option.

2. Correct emulation of LRVGR and LRVR load reverse instructions to
prevent corruption when using same source and destination register.

3. Correct ASSIST instruction XDECI to correctly support negative
values with leading minus sign.

4. Correct zcobol to handle working storage and linkage sections
greater than 64k with correct setting of base registers as required for data
access.

5. The GUI interface has been corrected to support Windows long spacey
names in double quotes, plus periods are now allowed in path names.

6. Support label of entry point on END statement which can be
overridden via linker ENTRY command, and also allow assembly with missing
END statement.

7. Correct non-Windows command processor Perl script cmd.pl to ignore
leading spaces on command lines to prevent errors on " EXIT" etc.

This is the last release I personally plan to publish as I am closing
Automated Software Tools and retiring as primary developer and stepping back
to let other interested developers take over future development of this open
source project. I will continue to be available to help answer questions,
but not to do the actual coding, testing, packaging, and publishing.

Many thanks to all those who have contributed to this project since it
started in 2005. A few special thanks are in order:

1. Thanks to Melvyn Maltz for massive effort on zCICS, testing of zCICS
support framework including EXEC CICS parser, assembler, zcobol, TN3290,
sockets, VSAM, etc. Also thanks for presentations at SHARE and GSE in
England.

2. Thanks to Ray Mullins who has been a long standing volunteer admin
both on the www.sourceforge.net z390 project repository and also on the z390
and zcobol www.yahoogroup.com email group websites.

3. Thanks to Abe Kornelis for contributing time and effort to test new
features and changes. Abe is currently working on pending RPI 1209 to
consolidate, optimize, and extend the opcode tables to include vector
processing instructions.

4. Thanks to John Hennesy for contributing time and effort to test new
zcobol features and changes plus contributing new zcobol based debugger.

5. Thanks to Martin Ward for all his help with Linux support questions
and associated Perl scripts.

All feedback, suggestions, and bug reports are welcome.

Don Higgins
[email protected]
www.don-higgins.net <http://www.don-higgins.net

Reply via email to