Introduction

ACUCOBOL-GT is a single-pass ANSI X3.23-1985 COBOL compiler (ccbl). Errors encountered during compilation are displayed on the screen (or written to an error file if one is requested) referencing the line where the error was detected by source file and line number. A source listing, a symbol table listing, and general information can be created on request.

A successful compile produces an object-code file. This file is ready to be run by the ACUCOBOL-GT runtime system, runcbl. No linking is needed to run the program. Any programs that are called during execution are loaded dynamically at run time by runcbl. Subprograms written in C may be linked into the run time system directly, or loaded dynamically if packaged in a Windows DLL or UNIX/Linux shared object library, and then called by a COBOL program using the CALL verb.

Note: The compiler, the runtime, and some utility programs have different names, depending on the host system. For simplicity in this manual, we refer to the utilities by their base names (vutil, vio, logutil, and cblutil).

runcbl has a symbolic source-level debugger built into it. You can run any program under the debugger by specifying the debugger option (-d) at run time. The debugger runs in its own window, which overlays the running program. This prevents the debugger's output from interfering with the program's output.