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.