COBOL Manual for TNS and TNS/R Programs

HP Extensions to ISO COBOL
HP COBOL Manual for TNS and TNS/R Programs—522555-006
17-2
Language Elements
Language Elements
The HP extensions to ISO/ANSI COBOL that are language elements are:
•
HP COBOL requires at least one character in a COBOL word to be either a letter
or a hyphen; COBOL requires a letter.
•
In HP COBOL, using a COBOL word as a library-name does not interfere with its
concurrent use as the name of an entity in another category; however, library-
names must be unique among themselves.
•
COBOL limits the forms of system-names to those permitted for user-defined
names. HP COBOL relaxes this restriction. The use of each particular system-
name is limited to contexts appropriate for its category. The few minor restrictions
on duplicate usages of system-names are discussed in SPECIAL-NAMES
Paragraph.
•
HP COBOL allows you to qualify status condition-names.
•
COBOL does not permit the decimal point as the rightmost (last) character of a
numeric literal; HP COBOL relaxes this restriction somewhat:
°
If the apparent last character of a numeric literal qualifies as a decimal point
and the immediately following character is not a space (but is a semicolon,
comma, or right parenthesis), the compiler interprets that last character as the
decimal point.
°
If the apparent last character qualifies as a decimal point but the immediately
following character is a space, the compiler interprets that last character and
the space together as the separator that follows the literal.
Data Fundamentals
The only HP extension to ISO/ANSI COBOL that affects data fundamentals is byte
alignment of binary data items (see PORT and NOPORT
).