ACUCOBOL-GT is designed to make porting programs between different environments as easy as possible. To aid in this, the compiler runs under one of five compatibility modes. These five modes support source code portability to/from VAX COBOL, ICOBOL, RM COBOL (version 2), IBM DOS/VS COBOL, and HP COBOL programming environments. ACUCOBOL-GT supports a reasonable subset of these COBOL implementations. This is accomplished in two fashions. When these compilers have differing but distinct syntaxes for accomplishing the same thing, all syntaxes are supported. For example, in RM/COBOL, the word BLINK is used to turn on the blinking attribute. In VAX COBOL, the phrase used is WITH BLINKING. Because these phrases do not conflict with each other, both are supported.
In some cases, the compiler cannot simultaneously accept both methods of doing something because they conflict. For example, VAX COBOL and RM/COBOL have different rules for determining the default cursor position for a DISPLAY statement. In this case, ACUCOBOL-GT defaults to using the VAX COBOL interpretation unless the -Cr or -Ci flag is used at compile time. The use of these flags is detailed in Compatibility Options.
Many operational characteristics can be configured at runtime. See Runtime Configuration for more information.
See ANSI ACCEPT and DISPLAY Verbs for compatibility information concerning ANSI ACCEPT and DISPLAY verbs.