For a list of supported PP2 COBOL dialects, see Operating Systems and Host Programming Languages Compatibility. COBOL statements generated by PP2 are accepted by the compilers for these environments. In addition, the COBOL statements generated by PP2 conform to these ANSI standard COBOL dialects:
- COBOL 1974 standard, X3.23-1974 (COBOL 74)
- COBOL 1985 standard, X3.23-1985 (COBOL 85)
The only exception occurs when the HOST(COBOLII) precompiler option is specified. In this case, PP2 recognizes and generates code that makes use of the COBOL extensions peculiar to VS COBOL II.
Specify either of two types of output formatting with the MARGINS (n,m) option:
- ANSI
- Terminal style
This document refers to standard COBOL as ANSI in discussing program format. The default format is ANSI, with the margins set to 8 and 72.
The beginning column specification for MARGINS, n, must be 1 or 8; any other value causes an error.
By specifying MARGINS(1,m), PP2 follows terminal format rules and can be specified with a value up to 255.
The COBOL precompiler is executed by invoking module PPBMAIN.
For more information, see Connecting to the Database and Invoking PP2 For linkage details, see Sample Application Linkage Procedure