COBOL Manual for TNS and TNS/R Programs

HP COBOL Manual for TNS and TNS/R Programs—522555-006
3-1
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).
Topics:
•
COBOL Character Set
•
Punctuation Characters
•
Character-Strings
Figure 3-1. Language Element Relationships
Source
Program
Character-Strings
COBOL Character Set
ASCII Character Set
Punctuation
Characters
256-Character Set
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