WINZOS Version 7.4

As of June 15, 2025 a new release of WINZOS is made available on the WINCOBOL.COM website. A major upgrade was initiated to support COBOL "OF and IN" used in procedure divisions constructs.

Although the use of "IN and OF" was supported in execution, the syntax was not supported during animation - it is now supported in animation.

GnuCOBOL now detects a zero divide operation. If detected the application is terminated with the program, statement number of the offense.

Improvements were also made to the conditional execution of steps within a job.

A caveat: A call to CEE3ABD or the detection of SOCB or SOC7 will terminate the job stream. Remaining steps are flushed and not executed.

Presuming the absence of a a SOC7 /CEE3ABD, setting a return code via MOVE 12 to RETURN-CODE (or whatever) will honor the COND= parameter of subsequent steps (or the Job level specification).

If animation is required it is highly advisable to use function code "B" on the compile screen - after a successful animation compile. Doing so permits the setting of break point(s) prior to animation.

This release has been upgraded to use the most recent components of the Gnu compiler tool chain (version 15.1).

Several other enhancements and remediated defects are included in the latest release.

There is a very ugly COBOL example depicting "IN and OF" use.

On the WINCOBOL.COM website I have included a video of the animation of program AWRITEBC.COB. I have purposefully slowed the animation speed, using a speed of "2", as requested by some users to better understand the video presentation. Notice that I click on the "ORDER-WAREHOUSE" data field, I then press "N" (No advance - display data field), the animation components resolve the expression then presents the Update Data Field Panel.

Using the above panel, animation supports modifying the data field, watching the data field, or simply displaying the data field and returning.  

Please take a peek at the animation of AWRITEBC on the WINCOBOL website.

I would like to thank Chuck Haadvedt for the gazillion hours of his efforts in implementing expression evaluation and additionally for his efforts in upgrading and packaging the GnuCOBOL compiler.