COBOL Manual for TNS and TNS/R Programs

Language Elements

HP COBOL Manual for TNS and TNS/R Programs—522555-006

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Comments

All characters appearing within a comment-entry or comment line are a part of that

entity and are never interpreted as separators in that context.

Nonnumeric and National Literals

Characters appearing within a character-string that represents a nonnumeric or

national literal are components of its value and are never interpreted as separators.

Numeric Literals and PICTURE Character-Strings

Several punctuation characters (comma, period, left parenthesis, right parenthesis) are

also defined as characters available for the formation of numeric literals and PICTURE

character-strings. They are not separators in these contexts but instead represent a

part of that language element; however, an exception exists if the apparent last

character of such a character-string is a period or comma immediately followed by a

space. In this case, the period or comma is always interpreted as part of the separator

following the character-string, and not as the last character of the numeric literal or

PICTURE character-string.

Character-Strings

A character-string consists of one or more characters that form:

•

COBOL Words

•

Literals

•

PICTURE Character-Strings

•

Comments

Most character-strings are limited to certain characters, but nonnumeric literals (except

for hexadecimal literals beginning with X ) and comments can contain any characters.

Character-strings and separators form the text of COBOL source programs.