COBOL Manual for TNS/E Programs (H06.08+, J06.03+)

3 Language Elements
The smallest unit of the COBOL language is a character. You use most characters to form
character-strings, and you use a few punctuation characters to form separators. The text of a source
program consists of character-strings delimited by separators.
Most character-strings and all separators consist of one or more characters from the COBOL
character set, which is a subset of the ASCII character set. The character-strings that are exceptions
to this rule are comments and nonnumeric literals, which can contain any of 256 characters
(although ASCII characters are recommended).
Figure 3 Language Element Relationships
Topics:
• COBOL Character Set
• Punctuation Characters
• Character-Strings
COBOL Character Set
The COBOL character set is a subset of the ASCII character set (which is listed in Appendix A:
ASCII Character Set). The COBOL character set has 78 characters; the ASCII character set has
128.
COBOL Character Set 59