In every shop I've been in, the Cobol file status codes are always included with the message. To not provide them would take me some getting used to. I'm not saying it's wrong to do it that way, it would just take some getting used to.

Still, Micro Focus has many implementer defined file status codes, in the form of 9x, where x is a binary number between 0 and 255. I wouldn't want to interrogate that and make a message for each one. Especially since the software is ported to a dozen different platform's Cobol vendors for each release. It's good to be generic.

We convert the binary number to a display number and include it in the message. That has sufficed in all cases.

Also, there is at least one Cobol vendor that returns 0x status codes, where x is any letter from A to M (upper and lower case). In my mind, I'm happy with "00" telling me that it was successful. I don't need 0x telling me why it was successful. But there's a vendor that does. It's in the ISO specifications for them.

Here I thought I'd seen every Cobol compiler in the world. Which vendor does this?