isCOBOL 2025 R1 has been enhanced to improve compatibility with other COBOL dialects such as MicroFocus COBOL and IBM COBOL. The syntax improvements in the compiler are related to nested programs and XML. A new library routine has been added.

Multiple programs can be included in the same source file repeating the PROGRAM-ID / END PROGRAM syntax. There are two different scenarios:

For example, in the code:

There are three declared PROGRAM-IDs; “customer” and “product” that are sibling programs and can be called as normal programs, and “show”, which is a program-id declared inside the “product” program and therefore can only be called inside the “product” program. Executing the same CALL to “show” in a different program causes the runtime error “CALL not found” to be raised.

XML PARSE is a statement used to parse an XML document into its individual components that are then passed, one at a time, to a user-written processing procedure. The XML GENERATE statement converts data to XML format. In version 2025 R1 the additional clauses VALIDATING and ENCODING are now supported to improve compatibility and enhance the feature:

For example, the following code snippet:

declares the XML-SCHEMA named XMLSCHART under SPECIAL-NAMES, assigning it to a physical schema (.xsd) file. During the XML PARSE, the XMLSCHART schema is passed to the VALIDATING clause. Both statements, XML GENERATE and XML PARSE use the ENCODING clause to force a different encoding than the one used when running. In this case 1208 means UTF-8.

A new library routine named CBL_LOCATE_FILE has been implemented to enhance compatibility with MicroFocus COBOL. The CBL_LOCATE_FILE routine has two uses: it can be used to expand an environment variable in a file specification, where the environment variable contains a list of several paths. It can also determine whether an OPEN INPUT statement using a particular file specification finds the file on disk.

A code snippet like this:

checks if the dyncall.dll library is in the PATH.