Am 30.07.2021 um 06:03 schrieb Michael Potter:
Gnu Crew, I am compiling some COBOL that I got from an AS/400. 05 FILE-FLAG PIC 1 VALUE B"0". 88 FILE-FLAG-OPEN VALUE B"1". 88 FILE-FLAG-CLOSE VALUE B"0". I am not the most widely travelled man, but I have never seen a PIC 1 before. The context appears to be a boolean.
Totally correct. This became standard COBOL with COBOL2002
The GnuCOBOL 3.1 RC-1 programmer's guide does not reference PIC 1 (as far as I can see by quick search of syntax of PICTURE-STRING). It throws this error: AXXXXA.cbl: 146: error: invalid PICTURE character '1' AXXXXA.cbl: 146: error: PICTURE string must contain at least one of the set A, N, X, Z, 1, 9 and *; or at least two of the set +, - and the currency symbol Which is curious because the error message refers to 1 as a valid character in the picture clause.
That's because it is not implemented yet but the syntax check for the PICTURE characters were written against the standard already.
1. How can I get this code to compile and run?
a) explicit change PIC 1 to PIC 9 b) as GnuCOBOL 2.x got (a likely unfinished implementation of) that in 2018 (see the related FR [1]) - double check your version; there has to be a really big reason to use anything older than 2.2 (and also using 2.2 would be a bit questionable)
2. How could have I found that answer myself?
In general I'd suggest to have a look at the COBOL standard first, when inspecting "what is that" (there is a public draft available for whatever COBOL standard is in the progress [2]). In this case you'd have found: 13.18.39.3 DATA DIVISION clauses, PICTURE clause, General rules > 1 Each symbol '1' represents a boolean position that will be checked to contain a boolean character. To find out about potential bugs and feature requests: check the issue trackers [3]. To find out what GnuCOBOL does: check the source, for parsing and general syntax checks in cobc/parser.y, cobc/typeck.c and cobc/tree.c.
3. If I have to change code what is the easiest thing to do? I have a couple hundred I would need to change.
For changing the sources I'd go with something like (warning: GNU extension): sed -i -e 's/\(\s\(pic\|picture\)\s\+1\)/\2 9/gi' But a quick test shows that GC 3.1.2 at least compiles a test source with that (likely without bailing out when using -std=cobol85); if you see something else then please provide a minimal example. Note: Without a deep check I _think_ boolean items are unfinished, they should work with direct MOVE and conditionals but use more than a single bit in storage - so programs that interoperate with non-gnucobol modules should not pass PIC 1 items via CALL/PROCEDURE DIVISION USING. Simon [1] https://sourceforge.net/p/gnucobol/feature-requests/303/ [2] https://isotc.iso.org/livelink/livelink?func=ll&objId=19468956 [3] https://sourceforge.net/p/gnucobol/_list/tickets
