What's New in V3R7?
The following list describes the enhancements made to ILE COBOL in V3R7:
- Century support
The capability for users to work with a 4-digit year has been added in the following statements and functions:
- ACCEPT statement with the YYYYDDD and YYYYMMDD phrases
- The following intrinsic functions convert a 2-digit year to a 4-digit
year:
- DATE-TO-YYYYMMDD
- DAY-TO-YYYYDDD
- YEAR-TO-YYYY
- The following intrinsic functions return a 4-digit year:
- CURRENT-DATE
- DAY-OF-INTEGER
- DATE-OF-INTEGER
- WHEN-COMPILED
- Floating-point support
The *FLOAT value of the CVTOPT parameter on the CRTCBLMOD and CRTBNDCBL commands allows floating-point data items to be used in ILE COBOL programs. Also, the affected statements (such as ACCEPT, DISPLAY, MOVE, COMPUTE, ADD, SUBTRACT, MULTIPLY, and DIVIDE) support floating-point.
- Data area support
New formats of the ACCEPT and DISPLAY statements have been added to provide the ability to retrieve and update the contents of IBM® i data areas.
- Intrinsic Functions
The following intrinsic functions have been added:
ACOS LOG10 ASIN LOWER-CASE ATAN MEAN CHAR NUMVAL COS NUMVAL-C CURRENT-DATE ORD DATE-OF-INTEGER REVERSE DAY-OF-INTEGER SIN DATE-TO-YYYYMMDD SQRT DAY-TO-YYYYDDD TAN INTEGER-OF-DATE UPPER-CASE INTEGER-OF-DAY WHEN-COMPILED LENGTH YEAR-TO-YYYY LOG - Binding Directory parameter—BNDDIR
The BNDDIR parameter has been added to the CRTBNDCBL command to allow the specification of the list of binding directories that are used in symbol resolution.
- Activation Group parameter—ACTGRP
The ACTGRP parameter has been added to the CRTBNDCBL command to allow the specification of the activation group that a program is associated with when it is called.
- Library qualified program objects and data areas
The LIBRARY phrase has been added to the following ILE COBOL statements to allow IBM i program objects and data areas to be qualified with a library name:
- CALL
- CANCEL
- SET
- ACCEPT
- DISPLAY
- Performance collection data
The ENBPFRCOL parameter has been added to the CRTCBLMOD and CRTBNDCBL commands, and to the PROCESS statement to allow performance measurement code to be generated in a module or program. The data collected can be used by the system performance tool to profile an application's performance.
- New ILE debugger support
The ILE debugger now allows you to:
- Debug most OPM programs
- Set watch conditions, which are requests to set breakpoints when the value of a variable (or an expression that determines the address of a storage location) changes.