Oracle 8 and Micro Focus COBOL

Pro*COBOL 8.x (or later) rejects some Micro Focus COBOL language extensions, data definitions and section headings:

• All pointer data types
• 88 level variables
• Constants in a Value clause
• Items defined as external-form
• Local-Storage Section
• Thread-Local-Storage Section

To overcome this you need to put these items into copybooks which are not opened by Pro*COBOL. However, this does not work if you use CP which expands copybooks before Pro*COBOL is invoked. This could cause a problem if you are using htmlpp which calls CP to expand copybooks. You must therefore invoke htmlpp before COBSQL.

For example, the following compile line works:

COBOL -k PROG P(HTMLPP) PREPROCESS(cobsql) CSQLT=ORACLE8 

whereas this line does not:

COBOL -k PROG PREPROCESS(cobsql) CSQLT=ORACLE8 P(HTMLPP)

You must define at least one variable within the Working-Storage Section for Pro*COBOL to add its variables to the generated .cbl file.