(Cross-posted to the Cat Herder Software blog.)

Last Tuesday, Feb 5, I presented at SHARE Winter 2013 in San Francisco, on z390, zCOBOL, zCICS, and the associated add-ons. This was my first time ever presenting at SHARE, or any user group at all. It was also my first attendance at a user group since, wow, 1989. (I am not counting my non-attendance at SHARE Summer 2012 in Anaheim, or the time I came down to SF to meet my boss at a Software AG user conference in the late 1990s.) it had been 18 months since Don Higgins presented on z390, and I thought that since SHARE was local, it would be a great opportunity to describe what is new, and what is coming.

I went in a bit nervous. The voice of my GA from my COMS 103 class at Sac State, Brie Adams, was whispering in my head on things not to do. I knew some friends of mine such as Ed Jaffe were attending. And then things got even more nervous. Not only was Mr. HLASM, Dr. John Ehrman, attending, but his successor. Sharuff Mousa (from Hursley) as well. And people I knew like Kristine Harper, and people I knew but had just finally met in person, like Rich Smrcina, Tom Conley, and Scott Fagen, were attending. And complete strangers as well. (I found out later that day that Mr. z/OS himself, Bob Rogers, wanted to attend but had a conflict. I think I would have died if he had made it.)

But onward I went. And I think I did pretty well. I handled questions, even having to answer some off the cuff. I made new contacts. I will admit that I haven't looked at the evaluations yet; I'm a bit scared to do so. And I probably was nervous some as well. Mary Anne Matyaz snapped a photo of me during my session, and my wife Cheri says I look nervous. I'm not surprised. (And having just looked again at the photo, I'm grabbing the chair.)

The rest of the day was a bit of a blur. Because of Mary Anne's gentle arm-twisting, I chaired a couple of sessions in the afternoon, and in one I finally met Kirk Wolf in person. Then I helped with some subterfuge and got my friend Chris Craddock (again, whom I had not met in person until he came to collect the badge) into the Expo. The next couple of hours were just tagging along with Chris and meeting even more folks whom I knew from the various mainframe-oriented mailing lists and Facebook. That evening was a CA-hosted party on the 45th floor, where I saw Meral Temel (sadly, I had no real chance to talk with her other than a quick "hello") and met Skip Robinson and Sam Knutson (again, finally in person!). And I'm sure I met a couple of others, and I apologize for forgetting already.

A big thanks to Crash Craddock for letting me crash at his place.

Unfortunately, unless the Braves are playing the Sox interleague that week, I won't be in Boston. But Winter 2014 is in Anaheim and I am already making plans. I hope to see you there!

My presentation can be downloaded from the SHARE web site (Session 12252), or if you are patient it can be loaded from the z390 or Cat Herder Software's web site later this week. (I will update with links when they are ready; I have to fix a couple of types I found.)
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Welcome! Some changes have occurred with the z390 project since the last entry was published back in summer 2010. So here's what's happened since then.

Latest release: 1.5.06

The latest release of z390, including zCOBOL, zpar, zCICS, and other components was released in May of this year. You can download it here.

Administrator changes

With the latest release, Don Higgins has retired from active management and participation, although he is still around to answer questions and give basic guidance. Taking over administration are Ray Mullins of Cat Herder Software, LLC (your author) and Abe Kornelis of Bixoft. Both have decades of experience with IBM z/Architecture assembler, with Ray's experience from the systems and internals side of z/OS, z/VSE,  z/VM, and BS2000/OSD, and Abe's experience from the applications side, primarily z/OS. ... read more

z390 v1.5.01e now supports the creataion of alternate indexes using REPRO and also supports sequential access by alternate key via use of PATH defined in catalog. For more information visit www.z390.org.
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The latest update to z390 v1.5.01c now has new open source mainframe compatible sort utility which uses the familiar SORTIN, SORTOUT, and SYSIN control file with SORT FIELDS+(...) supporting 7 standard key field types. Sort work files SORTWK01 and SORTWK02 are dynamically allocated if needed for merge. Regression tests are included with new sort. A 1,000,000 records can be sorted in less than 30 seconds on a 3 GHZ Dell with Windows or Linux. For more information visit this page on the new sort:

www.z390.org/z390_ZSORT_Internal_Sort_Utility.htm

Don Higgins
don@higgins.net
www.z390.org
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With the release of z390 Portable Mainframe Assembler and zcobol Portable Mainframe COBOL PTF v1.5.01a, there is now a new utility named ZPARTRS which can be used to generate COBOL, Assembler and EXEC CICS source code execution traces. The utility is documented on www.zpar.org and there are 4 examples with PDF source code, traces, and screen captures for COBOL, Assembler, smf EXEC CICS source code transaction traces. The utility includes options for including or excluding selected modules from trace plus option for including detail execution trace showing values for instruction operands as well as source code labels and comments. There are also options to include or exclude time stamps, messages such as WTO, traces, or errors.

For example see how a 1.5 MB EXEC CICS z390 exeution TRE trace file (similar to GTF trace) can be transformed into a 3 page COBOL and EXEC CICS source statement trace for specific COBOL transaction module TESTBEC1.CBL using ZPARTRS utility. Here is the EXEC CICS COBOL source transaction program:

http://www.zpar.org/TESTBEC1_CBL.pdf

Here is the source only trace with COBOL line numbers:

http://www.zpar.org/ZPARTRS_CICS_TESTBEC1_CBL.pdf

Here is alternate COBOL source and generated assembler source trace:

http://www.zpar.org/ZPARTRS_CICS_TESTBEC1_CBL_ASM.pdf

And here is the CICS TN3270 screen capture for the executed transaction BEC1:

http://www.zpar.org/ZPARTRS_CICS_TESTBEC1_SCREEN.pdf

These and similar links for 3 othere demos can be found on www.zpar.org. The COBOL source and assembler type traces provide excellent learning tool to see what kind of mainframe z9/z10 assembler code is generated for a specific COBOL statement. For example the COBOL Hello World demo program consisting of DISPLAY 'Hellow World" and STOP RUN, generates exactly 5 assembler instructions in the procedure division as shown here:

http://www.zpar.org/ZPARTRC_HELLO_CBL_ASM.pdf

Of course this does not inlude the 29 initialization instructions generated for every zcobol
program to load the zcobol runtime load module and verify version. Hee is alternative trace of the same COBOL program with DETAIL option which forces COBOL and assembler source plus execution detail line showing values of instruction operands for all instructions including the standard initializtion instructions which were skipped in prior trace:

http://www.zpar.org/ZPARTRC_HELLO_CBL_DETAIL.pdf

z390 v1.5.01a PTF can be downloaded from www.z390.org with InstallShield for Windows and file image for Linux. This PTF has been regression tested on Windows Vista, XP, and Ubuntu 8.o4 LTS Linux. The pre-requisites are z390 v1.5.01 base install and J2SE 1.6+. For more details on the enhancements and fixes in this PTF visit:

http://www.z390.org/z390_Download_Archive.htm

Don Higgins
don@higgins.net
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A new z390 webpage www.z390.org/java has been published to display java version installed on Windows or Linux with any web browser.

Don Higgins
don@higgins.net
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z390 and zcobol full release v.1.5.01 is now available for download and install using InstallShield for Windows from www.z390.org. This release includes new Unicode codepage support for ASCII and EBCDIC codepages compatible with z/OS. The zcobol compiler now compiles 408 of the NIST COBOL 1985 COBOL test suite programs with no hard assembler errors and MNOTE level 8 messages for those features not yet supported. See the latest NIST test statistics here:

http://www.zcobol.org/zcobol_NIST_COBOL_1985_Test_Results.htm

The above page also contains new ZPAR frequency distribution report examples showing the COBOL macro calls generated by the zcobol zc390 translation program and also another frequency distribution report showing the generated 390 opcodes in the generated HLASM source code produced by the zcobol compiler.

This release also includes zCICS v8 support which includes 13 EXEC CICS COBOL programs you can compile and execute on Windows or Linux using z390 and zcobol.

Don Higgins
don@higgins.net
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The www.zcobol.org website has been updated with new zcobol NIST Test Suite Results:

http://www.zcobol.org/zcobol_NIST_COBOL_1985_Test_Results.htm

The upcoming z390/zcobol full release v1.5.01 successfully translates and assembles 409 NIST test suite COBOL programs with no hard assembly errors and just MNOTE's identifying as yet unsupported features. Two new www.zpar.org reports have been added: The first shows the frequency distribution of translated macro call statements, and the second shows the frequency of all generated HLASM Basic Assembler Language (BAL) instructions.

Also included is a current pending priority list for future zcobol development. All users interested in participating should join the zcobol email group where you can submit your own priority list. In addition to the current HLASM target language enviroment, there are also plans to develop additional sets of zcobol code generation macros for Java, C, and Intel MASM.

Don Higgins
don@higgins.net
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A new ZPAR report ZPARSUM2 now automatically generates summary of all NIST COBOL 1985 test programs translated, assembled, and executed using test version of zcobol v1.5.01.
The summary report is on the www.zcobol.org site here:

http://www.zcobol.org/#zcobol_NIST_Test_Results

457 out of the total 459 translate cleanly from COBOL source to HLASM compatible source. But there is still much work to do to get all 457 assembled without errors and then executed cleanly.

Don Higgins
don@higgins.net
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The latest z390 and zcobol PTF v1.5.00e contains new ZPAR utilities which are documented on www.zpar.org and includes:

1. ZPARGEN for batch compile of COBOL and assembler programs

2. ZPARERR summary report of all errors from batch compiles and/or assemblies. See example of latest compile results for 430 of the COBOL 1985 ANSI NIST test suite on www.zcobol.org

3. ZPARTRS trace program source statement execution for zcobol or z390 assembler program.

The latest z390 PTF with zcobol and ZPAR utilities is available from www.z390.org

Don Higgins
don@higgins.net
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