I'm trying to take this migration in bite-sized chunks. I'm trying to get my RM into the same Eclipse environment that Visual Cobol uses, because I'm going to need to be as comfortable with it as I am with my current texted based environment (Text editor).
I played around and found the solution I was looking for ... cobol.dir does not allow for setting the dialect to RM (DIALECT"RM"). I built my own .dir (rm.dir, I know original). And if add the line $set use"/data/esource/rm.dir" at the top of my old rm code, I can compile in Eclipse quickly without having to set the build properties to RM on every program.
For reference the contents of rm.dir are
idxformat"21"
DIALECT"RM"
For building runnable code, at the moment anyway.
I just
1. Create COBOL REPORT PROJECT.
2. New File and Link to the existing Code.
3. Add the above $set command
4. Save
5. Watch it compile/build
6. Make sure the program works, and make it live if it does
This way I can quickly go through my programs, and only deal with issues related to RM assumptions that are not built into DIALECT"RM" such as assuming we took the time to add filler to the end of all files.
Once I get all of my systems in the VisualCobol/Eclipse IDE, I start learning Visual Cobol, and converting them to that DIALECT.
Thanks so much for your responses. Where I got caught is that cobol.dir a default directives file for Eclipse/VisualCobol doesn't allow you to override the DIALECT to RM, but another .dir file would work just fine.