Open PL/I was designed to be, and still is, an ANSI standard PL/I compiler. Customers interested in migrating need to assume
changes to existing PL/I applications may be required to remove any proprietary mainframe syntax and/or deal with differences
in behavior in order to make programs portable.
Compiler
- PL/I can be compiled, linked and debugged in 32-bit and 64-bit mode on
Windows and
the following UNIX platforms: Solaris (SPARC), Red Hat Linux (Intel), SUSE Linux (Intel). AIX, HP-UX Itanium and z/Linux are
not currently supported.
- As no PL/I compiler implementation exists on HP-UX Itanium or the z/Linux platforms, then any remote compilation of PL/I programs
to those platforms from the Eclipse IDE is not possible. You will still be able to create a remote connection to those platforms
and create PL/I programs and include files. However, when attempting to compile, the Ant build will fail. The same problem
will occur on AIX too.
- On SUSE, the PL/I CodeWatch debugger does not display output with MicroFocus ViewNowX. To resolve this issue, you need to
install a HotFix of ViewNowX - contact Micro Focus SupportLine for more details.
CodeWatch
- The sample demo sessions in the back of the CodeWatch User's Guide may not match exactly with this version of CodeWatch.
- CodeWatch is unable to evaluate an array in a based structure when the dimensions of the array are declared using the REFER
option.
- Problems may arise when evaluating expressions containing certain built-in functions, especially when given incorrect arguments
(for example, wrong type or wrong number of).
- EVALUATE of BASED and CONTROLLED arrays do not work when using CodeWatch.
- When using CodeWatch, EVALUATE can not use the POSITION attribute.
- On platforms where the WIDECHAR data type is supported, CodeWatch allows evaluation of WIDECHAR variables only. Evaluation
of WIDECHAR expressions is currently not supported.
For WIDECHAR variable evaluation, half byte-pairs outside the ASCII range display as a '.' character. Use the
EVALUATE command with the
/h option to display hexadecimal values for each byte-pair. For example:
dcl wc wchar (16) init('003900370038'Wx);
...
eval wc
WC = .9.7.8. . . . . . . . . . . . . {widechar (16)}
eval /h wc
WC = 00 39 00 37 00 38 00 20 00 20 00 20 00 20 00 20 00 20 00 20 00 20 00 20 00 20 00 20 00 20 00 20 (hex) {widechar (16)}
Eclipse PL/I Debugger
- The variables for the current line of execution are not automatically displayed in the Variables pane. The workaround is to
manually enter variables in the Expressions pane.
- Setting a variable watchpoint by setting a breakpoint on the line of the DCL statement is not possible in this release. Variable
watchpoints can be set by selecting the variable(s) in the Outline pane.
- Although Eclipse saves variable watchpoints from session to session, they turn into line numbers for declarations after restarting
Eclipse which is not enough information for the PL/I debugger.
- The Expressions pane may not display complex structures correctly, especially if they contain array elements on one or more
levels. The workaround is to add smaller sections of the structure to Expressions rather than the entire structure.
- The Expressions pane will not display arrays that contain more than 100 elements. If you need to view an array that contains
more than 100 elements, add the individual array elements to the Expressions pane instead.
- Although Eclipse allows breakpoints to be set in include files, they will not be honored by the debugger as there are no debug
symbols available to support for them.
- On UNIX, no output window is being displayed for viewing output or entering input.