zCOBOL Portable Mainframe COBOL Options and File Types
Command Line options for zCOBOL Compiler
To turn off an option that is on, prefix the option name with NO on command line or in OPT options file.
| Option | Default | Description |
| @file | NO | Retrieve additional options from free form text file with default suffix OPT. Options can be specified delimited by spaces on as many lines as requires. All characters on a line following * are ignored as comments. The @file option can be nested. The default path is the program path. |
| CICS | NO | Parse COBOL EXEC CICS commands into z390 EXEC CICS compatible macro calls and also rename working storage to DFHEISTG. |
| COMMENT | YES | Generate MLC comments showing original COBOL statement preceding each macro call statement. |
| EXTEND | YES | Support up to 31 digits for DISPLAY (Z) and COMP-3 (P) type data items rather than limiting precision to ANSI 1985 standard of 18. |
| FLOAT(DECIMAL) | YES | Set type of floating point for usage FLOAT-SHORT, FLOAT-LONG, and FLOAT-EXTENDED. The choices are FLOAT(HEX) for Hexidecimal Floating Point (HFP) like COMP-1 and COMP-2, FLOAT(BINARY) for Binary Floating Point (BFP), or the default FLOAT(DECIMAL) for Decimal Floating Point (DFP). |
| R64 | YES | Generate 64 bit instructions for the 16 GPR registers where appropriate. NOR64 restricts code generation to only use lower 32 bits of 16 GPR registers as required by z/VSE and some other operating environments. (Note option TRUNC and NOR64 results in use of DXR instead of DGR which is more efficient.) |
| TRACE | NO | Generate WTO display of paragraph name at entry to each new paragraph in procedure division. This provides high level trace as opposed to using the z390 TRACE(E) option which generates instruction level trace. |
| TRUNC | NO | Truncate binary data types F, G, and H to specified number of digits in PICTURE. |
| WARN | YES | Generate level 4 MNOTE warnings from zcobol macros |
- Options are passed to the zcobol macro stage via CBL macro call with the options defined as positional parameters
| TYPE | Format | File Description | File or Report Format Description |
| CBL | ASCII | COBOL source program | 1-6 sequence #, 7 Comment if not space, 8-11 area A, 12-72 area B |
| MLC | ASCII | macro assembler source program generated by phase 1 of the zcobol compiler which uses zcobol.class regular expression based parser in z390.jar to read CBL source file and create MLC source file in one pass. | macro call. for each COBOL statement starting in area A and for each COBOL verb found in area B. Working storage data items are mapped to WS macro call with level as first parameter. Each macro call name is followed by positional parameters found following verb up to next verb or period. Periods are mapped to PERIOD macro call. Parameters of the form keyword(..) are passed as single parameter. Other ( and ) are passed as separate parameter in quotes. |
| BAL | ASCII | HLASM compatible source code generated by phase 2 of the zCOBOL compiler when using ZC390C or ZC390CLG commands. | HLASM compatible source statements generated by the zcobol+zcobol\z390 macros during expansion of the generated MLC file. |
| JAVA | ASCII | J2SE Java compatible source program file generated by phase 2 of the zCOBOL compiler when using ZCJAVC or ZCJAVCLG commands. | Java source statements generated by the zcobol+zcobol\java macros during expansion of the generated MLC file. |
| CPP | ASCII | MS Visual Express C compatible source program file generated by phase 2 of the zCOBOL compiler when using ZCVCEC or ZCVCECLG commands. | MS Visual Express C compatible source statements generated by the zcobol+zcobol\vce macros during expansion of the generated MLC file. |
| HLA | ASCII | HLA/MASM compatible source program file generated by phase 2 of the zCOBOL compiler when using ZC586C or ZC586CLG commands. | HLA/MASM compatible source statements generated by the zcobol+zcobol\i586 macros during expansion of the generated MLC file. |