🚀 go-pugleaf

A faculty member here is using VS COBOL II to teach an advanced course in
IBM VSAM. One of his assignments involves doing a merge of two input files
to an output file. We use VMSORT 2.2D and it works nicely on its own and
when using VS COBOL II V 3.3 to farm out sorts to it.

Unfortunately, VMSORT barfs when we do the simplest possible MERGE statement
from within VS COBOL II. The result is an abend with totally meaningless
dump information presented on the screen. By using COBTEST, I was able to
deduce only that the status variables for the two input files were both set
to 35. We are also up-to-date with our zaps to this product.

Of course, I contacted SCI regarding this matter. They seem as dumbfounded as
I was when I first saw this problem. The last conversation I had with someone
from SCI this afternoon  seemed to indicate that some user exit 32 was being
used by our COBOL compiler to farm out the merging, but that they do not fully
support that exit. SCI is still checking into this problem for me, but I was
wondering if anyone else out there experienced difficulties using VS COBOL II
with VMSORT to do file merges. I suspect that this function isn't available
to anyone, not just to me, but maybe I'm  wrong. From what I gathered from SCI,
they will have to write a new module to handle this exit 32 if it is indeed
the cause of this problem.

Thanks

Stan Horwitz
stan@vm.temple.edu
stan@templevm