Considerations for VS COBOL II programs

Language Environment® provides support for the execution of programs compiled by the VS COBOL II compiler. The native runtime library for this compiler is not supported. However, this compiler is not Language Environment-conforming (it is a pre-Language Environment compiler), so there are some restrictions and considerations associated with its use.

For detailed information on migrating VS COBOL II programs to Language Environment support, see the Enterprise COBOL for z/OS®: Compiler and Run-Time Migration Guide.

Language Environment callable services
Programs compiled by Language Environment-conforming COBOL compilers can use all Language Environment callable services, either dynamically or statically. However, for CICS® applications, the CEEMOUT (dispatch a message) and CEE3DMP (generate dump) services differ, in that the messages and dumps are sent to the CESE transient data queue rather than to the ddname specified in the MSGFILE runtime option.

VS COBOL II programs can make dynamic calls to the date and time callable services, but no other calls, either static or dynamic, to Language Environment callable services are supported for VS COBOL II programs.

Re-linking VS COBOL II programs
If object modules are not available for re-linking existing VS COBOL II programs to use the runtime support provided by Language Environment, a sample job stream for performing the task is provided in the IGZWRLKA member of the SCEESAMP sample library.
CICS stub
Although COBOL programs linked with the old CICS stub, DFHECI, run under Language Environment, use of the DFHELII stub is recommended and is essential in a mixed language environment. Start of changeDFHECI has to be link-edited at the top of your application, but DFHELII can be linked anywhere in the application.End of change
Using CEEWUCHA
If you are adapting VS COBOL II programs to use the runtime support provided by Language Environment, the sample user condition handler, CEEWUCHA, supplied by Language Environment in the SCEESAMP library, can be used to advantage. It does the following:
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