Language Environment provides callable services, which are classified
in the following categories:
- Storage services
- These allow you to allocate and free storage from the Language Environment
heaps.
- Error handling services
- These provide a common method of obtaining information to enable you
to process errors.
- Message services
- These provide a common method of handling and issuing messages.
- Date and time
- These allow you to read, calculate, and write values representing the
date and time. Language Environment offers unique pattern-matching capabilities
that let you process almost any date and time format contained in an input
record or produced by operating system services.
- National language support
- These allow you to customize Language Environment output (such as messages,
RPTOPTS reports, RPTSTG reports, and dumps) for a given country.
- Locale
- These allow you to customize culturally-sensitive output for a given
national language, country, and codeset by specifying a locale name.
- General
- These are a set of callable services that are not directly related to
a specific Language Environment function, for example, dump.
- Mathematical
- These allow you to perform standard mathematical computations.
These services are normally only available to programs
compiled with Language Environment-conforming compilers. As an exception,
VS COBOL II programs can make dynamic calls to the date and time callable
services, but they cannot make any other dynamic calls or any static calls
to Language Environment callable services.
For further
information about the details of these services, see the z/OS: Language Environment Programming Guide. For information about the syntax
required to call any of the services, see the z/OS: Language Environment Programming Reference.