What are the decimal data types supported by COBOL and can Java incorporate any of these data types?
Answer I do not know the format of the JAVA BigDecimal data type. However, JAVA 1.5 now supports some new Decimal data types. I don’t know how that would be supported in COBOL. COBOL does not directly support BigDecimal, that I know of. You need to check the specifics of the COBOL / JAVA interoperability supported for your specific version of COBOL. I know the new COBOL 2002 standard provides improved support for JAVA/COBOL interaction. Both IBM and MicroFocus, the two major COBOL vendors, offer data interchange definitions. In MicroFocus, I used the COBOL PIC 99 format (character number format) for those places I needed to exchange data with Java. Not very advanced, but the interface I needed was mostly text and limited numerics. What types of decimal data do you need to support? Standard COBOL are character (Pic 999) as above (in ASCII x’30’-x’39’) and PIC 999 COMP-3 (Packed decimal). Packed decimal is not supported directly by Java. COBOL / JAVA does directly support BINARY integer.
