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The pages on this site contain documentation for very old MS-DOS software, purely for historical purposes. If you're looking for up-to-date documentation, particularly for programming, you should not rely on the information found here, as it will be woefully out of date.

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     IBM VS COBOL II and COBOL/370 let you use the REDEFINES clause on a
     POINTER data item, to redefine it as a PIC 9(9) COMP data item. You
     can then perform arithmetic operations on this item, giving the
     program the ability to shift the address referred to by a pointer
     up or down.
 
     If CONVERTPTR is specified, pointers are held in a form that is
     reversed with respect to native byte ordering. They are converted to
     the native form immediately before any SET ADDRESS OF linkage-item TO
     pointer statement, and immediately after any SET pointer TO ADDRESS OF
     ... statement.
 
     The CONVERTPTR directive has no effect on PROCEDURE-POINTER data
     items.
 
     Unexpected behavior may occur if the arithmetic carried out causes the
     pointer to cross the boundary of a data segment.
                                    -♦-