>I have a suspicion that this is a mixed language program. That is, it >consists of COBOL and, say C. (Or it uses COBOL features with a C run time >implementation such as XML or OO COBOL.) Can you confirm this is the case?
Allan, I cannot confirm this because I did not investigate so far in this case, but it may well be that XML is being used. As far as I know, we do not make use of OO COBOL. I can, however, confirm that we're facing a lot of troubles with programs after they get recompiled with COBOL V5.2 instead of COBOL V4.2. The reason being that the different instruction stream which COBOL V5.2 (and newer) generates increase the likelihood that the program may run into decimal overflow conditions. A simple MOVE statements that moves A to B where A is declared as PIC 9(7)V9(4) and B is declared as PIC V9(18) had never caused a decimal overflow in COBOL V4 but may well in COBOL V5 because the later is making use of decimal instructions that will recognized decimal overflow. We also see the decimal overflow mask bit in the PSW is turned on much more often, when COBOL V5 is being used. We know that using the XML is one reason, and running the prorgam under the IBM Debugger is another one, but we also see other cases, but did not find out what causes the mask to be set. The result of all this is that a decimal overflow happens more often, and chances are much higher that the overflow will raise a 00a program check interruption that LE error handling has to deal with, just to find out the COBOL program can continue. I just found another job late this afternoon which runs between 1 and 2 hours since the program was recompiled, but ran only a few minutes before. -- Peter Hunkeler ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
