Micro Focus Visual COBOL 2.3 for Visual Studio 2015 > Developing Applications in the IDE > Building COBOL applications > Compiling COBOL Applications > Setting Compiler Directives for COBOL

Setting Compiler Directives for COBOL

You can use directives to control the way the Compiler behaves: what output it produces, what code is compiled and how the compiled code behaves when it runs. For normal operation you need only a few directives. Most of the time, you use the default values.

Important: Setting some directives affects the default setting of other directives. For example, setting one directive might automatically unset another directive, and some directive settings are mutually exclusive.

In addition, you can set Compiler directives in a number of other ways, such as on the command line, or in a directives file, or as part of a response to a prompt.

Separate Compiler directives with a space. You can supply parameters either within brackets or quotation marks: for example charset"ascii" dialect(MF), and if you need more than one parameter for a particular directive, separate the parameters with a space: for example outdd(sysout 121 r e) or ACTUAL-PARAMS"MyInterface ClassA ClassB".