Micro Focus COBOL can be configured to "work like Mainframe COBOL": it can be used for "off Mainframe" development for a Mainframe target (requiring recompile) and for "migration from Mainframe with as few changes as possible".
I'm not saying it is perfect, but with V3 it should be very good. LINE SEQUENTIAL is a different file organisation, which can be used to represent the usual Linux/Unix/Windows records-determined-by-delimiters approach. Enterprise COBOL supports LINE SEQUENTIAL, and it could be used for instance to read such a file from USS. With LINE SEQUENTAL, on input, the record-delimiter is stripped. On output, trailing blanks *of the record* (not field-level) are stripped (simply discarded) and a record-delimiter is added. LINE SEQUENTIAL files must be "character only" (I think there's a Micro Focus extension which 'escapes' non-character bytes, but that's another thing). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
