compile error: picture clause required for 'ch-9'

[Cláudio Müller]

Hi,
I'm new to gnucobol

but i have experience in acu-cobol.

I'm trying to compile some acu-cobol programs to gnu-cobol and I'm having a hard time getting used to compiling.

I have this error

CHAIN.LIB = error: picture clause required for 'ch-9'

from source:

      01 ch-programa.
        03 ch-9.
           04 ch-teste        pic 9.
           04 ch-term         pic 99.

I'm looking at the documentation and I still don't understand what it could be.

the programs normally run in acu-cobol. But I want to migrate to GnuCobol 64-bit.

[Simon Sobisch]

This looks good and if you put it into a single source it will compile, so we'd need more context.
But you may want to compile with cobc -std=acu-strict -Wall prog.cob first to check if it compiles then and if not if there are any warnings (or even errors) before the diagnostic shown above.

[Cláudio Müller]

invalid option -- 'a' ??

[Simon Sobisch]

it is an uppercase "W" you want to use.

[Cláudio Müller]

it seems to me that there is a lot of adaptation to do
I didn't think there would be so many

[Simon Sobisch]

What version of GC is that (cobc -V)? If it is older than GC 3.2rc2, then definitely update that, then check again.

[Anonymous]

Windows 64-bits

[Simon Sobisch]

Can you please share the source lines around the first two errors? Those look quite interesting (and the first one possibly can be easily "skipped" (= pending), if it isn't yet).

[Anonymous]

Error Line 1017

[Simon Sobisch]

As I've expected the code is quite easy to get parsed with GnuCOBOL after a minimal change to cobc/parser.y:

-| UPPER                    /* EFS-UPPER                   --> 1024   */
-| LOWER                    /* EFS-LOWER                   --> 2048   */
+/*| UPPER                    /* EFS-UPPER                   --> 1024   */
+/*| LOWER                    /* EFS-LOWER                   --> 2048   */

and

 | FULL
   {
    set_screen_attr ("FULL", COB_SCREEN_FULL);
   }
+| LOWER
+  {
+   set_screen_attr ("LOWER", COB_SCREEN_LOWER);
+  }
+| UPPER
+  {
+   set_screen_attr ("UPPER", COB_SCREEN_LOWER);
+  }
 | PROMPT CHARACTER _is id_or_lit

... now you only have to wait for a (possibly nightly) windows binary that has the change included...

[Anonymous]

Error line 2463

[Simon Sobisch]

That's an error in GC 3.2 preview versions (not there in GC 3.1.2) and tracked with [bugs:#880], should be fixed before the next (and hopefully last) 3.2 pre-release; there's also a patch available already (not re-checked/integrated yet).

[Anonymous]

Error line 2945

[Simon Sobisch]

For now you'd have to split this into two DISPLAY statements as follows:

DISPLAY t23
DISPLAY "your text here" AT 2301

or - which from a quick glance possibly is what you want here - drop the t22, t23, ... variables and instead use

DISPLAY "your text here" AT 2301 ERASE EOL

which should work with acu-cobol, too

[Anonymous]

it's a shame, because the "display t23", clears the entire line 23 and I use this system wide.

this should work, is there no way to report it as a change in GnuCobol to accommodate this?

[Simon Sobisch]

It was either deemed to be to complicated to "easily add", or was deemed to be an error; the check was added in [r996], not sure if @edward-h remembers the details.

In theory typeck,c could emit multiple DISPLAY (always when the type switches), but this may be a change that isn't easy...

Something that is always possible is to apply a search-and-replace with an regex on the sources (the DISPLAY tNNN could be split to a separate statement this way), as an alternative to manually doing this.

[Anonymous]

can I compile and report more problems with the Acu-cobol I use today with GnuCobol 3.2 64-bit?

wanted to switch from acu-cobol to 64-bit GnuCobol in the near future.

[Simon Sobisch]

sure; but please check to not report the same issues - and please copy+paste code instead of pictures (ideally you could edit your previous image-posts in this thread and replace them with text-posts).

[Anonymous]

I am from Brazil!

[Simon Sobisch]

please login, that removes the moderation queue and you can add information like this to your profile...

[Cláudio Müller]

warning: WITH MASS-UPDATE is not implemented

does it mean it will be implemented?
I can leave it like this with-update for now in the sources?

[Simon Sobisch]

It possibly will implemented someday, for now this means that you get normal locking behavior and performance - the [RE-]WRITE will work as expected.

[Cláudio Müller]

       display cor-est at line w-lin column w-col + 4.

error: syntax error, unexpected +

"w-col + 4" error

[Simon Sobisch]

That seems to be [feature-requests:#414], as I've worked on something similar sine that was created, there is now an option to change parser.y as follows to get this parsed and likely also working:

 line_number:
-  LINE _number num_id_or_lit
+  LINE _number pos_specifier_value
   {
-   /* FIXME: arithmetic expression should be possible, too, only numeric literals! */
    $$ = $3;
   }
 ;

 column_number:
-  column_or_col_or_position_or_pos _number num_id_or_lit
+  column_or_col_or_position_or_pos _number pos_specifier_value
   {
-   /* FIXME: arithmetic expression should be possible, too, only numeric literals! */
    $$ = $3;
   }
 ;

I'll need to do some testing / adjusting (with this change test 416 fails, so a bit more to do), then should be able to commit this and the other change.