How are literals as arguments for a CALL statement handled?

Question

I'm trying to pass a string literal as an argument for a CALL statement.

CALL "SOMEPROGRAM" USING "SomeStringLiteralArg"

I must define the argument as a linkage item in the called subprogram:

LINKAGE SECTION.
 77 SOME-STRING-ARGUMENT PIC X(20).

That works, but when I pass a string literal shorter than 20 characters, the runtime starts complaining:

Passed USING item (#1) smaller than corresponding LINKAGE item.

The given string literal must be 20 characters long. But there are reasons for me to pass a string literal as argument:

• I'm too lazy to define a temporary variable for each item I pass to a program. Having 100 'temporary' variables with different lengths in the working storage for each item I pass to a program, would make the program unnecessarily cluttered.

  MOVE "ShortStrLit" TO SOME-TEMP-VAR
  CALL "SOMEPROGRAM" USING SOME-TEMP-VAR
  

• I also don't want to manually pad the string literal to match the required length of 20 characters:

  CALL "SOMEPROGRAM" USING "shortStrLit         "
  

One of my questions is, or course: how can I pass a literal as an argument for a CALL statement? But, more importantly, the underlying question is: how are literals passed as argument for a CALL statement handled? For example, if I pass 9, is it interpreted as a string with the contents "9", or is it compile-time converted to an integer?

---

I'm running MicroFocus ACUCOBOL-GT 9.2.4 on Windows 10.

Answer 1

Pic x any length is supported by isCobol. isCobol support the compilation of acucobol sources.

I don't know if acucobol can support but, if so, you can define a string (java.lang.string) in the linkage section. This is also supported by isCobol.

working-storage section.
77 SOME-STRING-ARGUMENT PIC X(20).

linkage section.
77  this-string object reference j-string.

procedure dividion using this-string.
main.
    set some-string-argument to this-string.

Answer 2

Two questions here:

First - How should I pass alphanumeric literals:

For CALL some-cobol-prog USING "alphanumeric literal" COBOL 2002 added the following:

LINKAGE SECTION.
 01 SOME-STRING-ARGUMENT PIC X ANY LENGTH.

If your compiler doesn't support it you're bound to either pad the literal or use a variable.

Second - Is a numerical literal interpreted as alphanumeric:

All compilers I've seen convert it to an integer - how and most important what type exactly depends on the compiler used...