Diff b/w PC cobol & Mainframe COBOL?

priya

Can anybody tell me some major differences b/w PC cobol and mainframe cobol?

mcmillan · Site Admin Joined: 18 May 2003 Posts: 873 Location: India

Dear priya,

PC COBOL Compilers uses ASCII collating sequence while Mainframe COBOL uses EBCDIC coding format. This is the major difference.

If you need the answer in depth, please let us know your PC Compiler...

sandip_datta · Posted: Wed Feb 25, 2004 8:52 am Post subject:

First of all,
1. "PC" Cobol runs on PC; mainframe Cobol runs on mainframes.

2. Mainframe Cobol lately is provided by IBM for the IBM mainframes and, I believe, by Unisys for the Unisys mainframes. "PC" Cobol is provided by a fairly large variety of vendors.

As a side note on alphanumeric comparsions, be aware of the collating sequence (called the hierarchy of the comparison) between a mainframe and another platform. On EBCDIC machines special characters are less than letters which are less than numbers; on ASCII machines, some special characters are less than numbers which are less than some additional special characters which are less than letters. The difference is worth mentioning if you are moving source code but not worth dwelling upon.

I am not sure but most probably CICS and other online concept is not applicable in PC COBOL.
Experts, if I am wrong, please correct me.

Some verbs are used differently -
ACCEPT is used to accept data from Screen in PC-COBOL and from SYSIN card in Mainframe-COBOL.
Similarly, DISPLAY displays data in screen in PC-COBOL but displays data in SYSOUT in Mainframe.

Regards,
Sandip.