EXTERNAL data item visibility shift when moving from ANSI COBOL 85 to COBOL 2002 with IBM Enterprise COBOL V6 linker options
The goal is to understand whether EXTERNAL data items become publicly accessible across separately loaded modules when upgrading from legacy COBOL to newer compiler versions that modify linkage behavior. Constraints include the differing definitions of EXTERNAL in ANSI COBOL 85 versus COBOL 2002, the IBM Enterprise COBOL V6 THREAD and NOEXTERNAL linker optio