Re: [open-cobol-list] Problem calling a known void function

[Roger While]

The upcoming 1.1 tarball (probably at the weekend) will allow
the syntax -
CALL ....   RETURNING NULL.

Please also note that the static-call option is deprecated
(it does not appear in the cobc --help) and will be removed at
some stage.

You should also ask yourself why you are resorting to
call system routines. More often than not there is
a COBOL equivalent.
eg. there is FUNCTION RANDOM.

Note also that if you just want temporary storage for the duration
of the program, then you can define fields in the
LOCAL-STORAGE SECTION.
These are dynamically acquired (and initialized) on entry to the program
and freed on exit from the program.

Messing around with COB_CFLAGS is NOT encouraged and,
most certainly, redefining standard library calls will lead to disaster.

Roger

> On Wed, 27 May 2009 12:39:21 Roger While wrote:
> >
> > Use COBOL syntax for doing this -
> >
> >         identification division.
> >         program-id. test-free.
> >         data        division.
> >         working-storage section.
> >         01 rec pic x(100) BASED.
> >         procedure  division.
> >             ALLOCATE rec.
> >             move "123" to rec.
> >             display rec.
> >             FREE rec.
> >             move 0 to return-code
> >             stop run.
>
> Thank you for your quick answer. We will look into it and use the COBOL
> syntax, but for now (while migrating) we have reasons to keep it the
> way it is. We have found a general workaround (e.g. for `srandom'):
>
> Create a header file "void_fix.h" like this:
>
> #define free dummy_free
> #define srandom dummy_srandom
> #include <stdlib.h>
> #undef free
> #undef srandom
> /* the open-cobol compilation works even without prototype */
> int free (void *ptr) ;
> int srandom (unsigned int seed) ;
>
>
> and for compilation do:
>
> CWD=`pwd`
> COB_CFLAGS="-include $CWD/void_fix.h"
> export COB_CFLAGS
> ....compile as before....
>
>
> Ehud.