• The preprocessor expects the input COBOL program to be in fixed format.
• The preprocessor ignores copies. Any CICS inside a copy will not be translated.
• The two words EXEC and CICS must be on the same line for a CICS instruction to be recognized.

In order to support the feature “TSAM call path for CICS and DB”, the preprocessor is asked to be executed ahead of “procob” (for Oracle DB) or “db2 prep” (for IBM UDB) commands when compiling CICS programs containing “EXEC SQL” statements.