RE: [open-cobol-list] question about linkage section variables

[William M. Klein]

Current and past ANSI/ISO Standards say "results are unpredictable" in such
cases.

Micro Focus has a directive that "changes" this behavior - appropriately
called
   sticky-linkage

This issue is PARTICULARLY nasty in cases where you have the "ENTRY"
extension to the Standard and different ENTRY statements have different
parameters listed.

IBM *does* document the use of "testing for NULLS" for "omitted parameters"
- see:

 
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/igy3pg20/4.2.1.3 

Bottom-Line:
   DEFAULTING to always NULLS seems reasonable to me.  Having a compile-time
option or switch to "maintain addressability" seems reasonable as well.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: address@hidden 
> [mailto:address@hidden On 
> Behalf Of David Korn
> Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2004 12:20 PM
> To: address@hidden; address@hidden
> Subject: [open-cobol-list] question about linkage section variables
> 
> cc:  address@hidden
> Subject: question about linkage section variables
> --------
> 
> With the current compiler, linkage section records that
> are not passed as usage parameters, are initialized
> to NULL pointers at the beginning of the module, for
> example
>       unsigned char *b_1152 = NULL;
> 
> However, this initialization takes place each time
> that the module is invoked.
> 
> 
> With the MVS compiler, values assigned to these variables
> are persistent.  I changed this to use
>       static unsigned char *b_1152 = NULL;
> instead to work around the problem.
> 
> I am not familiar with Cobol semantics.  Which is correct?
> 
> 
> David Korn
> address@hidden
> 
> 
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