Limitations - TypeCobolTeam/TypeCobol GitHub Wiki

Current limitations that we are looking to fix

Current known bugs that will be fixed soon

  • Continuation line doesn't works if the last character of the previous line ends with a quote (').

Current known bugs

  • EXEC SQL INCLUDE on multiple line. EXEC SQL INCLUDE on the same line works fine.
  • We do not check if a symbol is an UPSI Switch
  • Symbolic characters, class name
  • Renames
  • COPY instruction without a terminal .
  • Recursive programs
  • Replace of the following forms doesn't works.
000000 REPLACE ==UBININT-2== BY ==PIC 9==.              
000000 LOCAL-STORAGE SECTION.                                                                                 
000000 01 var UBININT-2.

Following Replace is working:

000000 REPLACE ==:MAX:== BY ==200==.              
000000 LOCAL-STORAGE SECTION.                                                                                 
000000 01 array.
000000    05 elt pic X occurs :MAX:.

Controls not done

  • Check if usage of variable with occurs respect occurs declaration
  • Most of the semantic checks

Things that will certainly remains forever

Cobol parsing known limitations

  • Some old syntax are not supported (ex: COPY SUPPRESS copyname) we are based on IBM Cobol V6.1 specs.

The following cases are allowed by Cobol reference but will not be accepted:

  • Paragraph and variables identifiers which contains only numeric characters. For example, 01. is a valid data description entry but can also be a paragraph name.

  • Partial Cobol word

  • User defined words of the form 123E-4, 123-4X or 266-24HOURS are valid according to the spec but will not be supported by this compiler. These cases are considered highly improbable, but we will have to check on a large body of existing programs. Purely numeric paragraph and section names are not supported.

Additional limitations: (as discussed in #59)

  • Because of the internal conversion of the program text to Unicode characters in .Net or Java, we do not support alphanumeric literals containing non printable EBCDIC characters
  • Because of the feature allowing free text format and variable line length, we do not support alphanumeric literals containing line ending characters
  • TCLIMITATION_NO_CE_ACROSS_SOURCES A cobol statement (Cobol85, 2002, 2014 or TypeCobol) can't be written across more than 1 source file because it'll be too complicated to generate the code across theses source files.

Potential problems with TypeCobol