You can either set the COBSW environment variable to

  COBSW=-F

prior to the execution of your program or you can start the program passing (-F) on the command line:

myprog (-F)

Thanks.

Thank you Chris.  I've opened my .CONFIG file, to see an "Application Settings" window with 2 tabs "Environment" and "COBOL switches" and added an environment variable with name COBSW and value -F but it still stops at every non-numeric.  Have I done it in the wrong place, or wrong way?

You cannot place the COBSW environment variable in the app.config file because the app.config file is processed after the run-time is initialized and COBSW needs to be processed during the run-time initialization.

We have added a new Environment button on the Application tab of the Properties pages into our next release which will be Visual COBOL 2.2 which will allow you to set COBSW within the IDE but the current version 2.1 Update 1 does not allow for this.

What type of output format are you generating, .int, .gnt or .exe?

If you are using .exe then you can turn this processing off by setting -F on the command line option of the debugging tab.

If you are using .int or .gnt then you will need to set COBSW=-F in the environment of your computer.

You can also turn off this check altogether in anything but .int code by using the compiler directive NOCHECKNUM.

Of course the real solution to the problem is to determine the underlying cause of the 163 error, unintialized data, bad data in record read, etc. and fix this.

Thanks.