On 13 December 2017 at 14:02, Charles Mills <[email protected]> wrote: > May I throw an odd question out here without fully explaining myself? Is > "inquiring minds want to know" enough of a reason for this question?
A couple of people on this list always seem to want a Business Reason for any question. Most of us are a bit more relaxed about it. Nothing wrong with curiosity... > The IBM COBOL compilers -- Enterprise V4/5/6, COBOL for OS/390, COBOL for > MVS and VM, earlier compilers -- are all documented as accepting two > parameters off of R1: the first is the standard PARM= halfword length and > character string and the second is the semi-standard DD name override table. > > I have seen some circumstantial evidence that they also accept a third > parameter (and for all I know, a fourth or fifth). I have a reason for being > curious about its or their function. > > Can anyone enlighten me, on- or off-list? Charlesm at mcn dot org. Any clues > would be appreciated. If you just said "I have also seen circumstantial > evidence of this" or "I once heard it was for ___" it might be a help. As Shmuel says, the page number is a traditional use after Options and DDNAMEs. The point being that you can invoke multiple utilities (or the same one multiple times) and have a consistently numbered listing in one output file. I have no idea if COBOL supports this. I recently raised on this list the issue of the disappearance of the IEBCPARM macro from z/OS. Turns out it was a packaging error, and it will be restored. Of course it's for the IEB utilities (or maybe even just for IEBCOPY), but it has OPTIONS, DDNAMES, PAGENUM, and then EXITS in its mapping - all fullword pointers to halfword length+<stuff>. The EXITS layout is almost certainly unique to IEBCOPY, but perhaps it's used similarly by other programs. As for secret magic COBOL options, sorry but I have no idea. Try passing something in with a non-zero but bogus pointer and see who abends... Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
