iTS 1.0+)

SCREEN COBOL Source Program

Compaq NonStop™ Pathway/iTS SCREEN COBOL Reference Manual—426750-001

2-13

Continuation Lines

Any word or literal in a SCREEN COBOL program can be continued. Continuation

lines are indicated by the hyphen character in the indicator field.

If the previous line has a nonnumeric literal without a closing quotation mark, the first

nonblank character in Area B of the continuation line must be a quotation mark. The

continuation begins with the character immediately following that quotation mark.

Compiler Command Lines

Compiler command lines are indicated by the question mark character in the indicator

field. The line is an instruction for the SCREEN COBOL compiler.

Normally, a compiler line in ANSI standard reference format is identified by a question

mark in column 7; however, the SCREEN COBOL compiler interprets any line with a

question mark in column 1 as a compiler command, even when the ANSI standard

reference format is being used. In this special case, the line is treated as beginning with

the indicator field; no sequence number area exists. Refer to Section 7, Compilation

, for

detailed information regarding compiler commands.

Arithmetic Operations

Arithmetic operations are specified in the Procedure Division with the ADD,

COMPUTE, DIVIDE, MULTIPLY, and SUBTRACT statements. These operations

have the following common features:

•

The data descriptions of the operands do not have to be the same. Any necessary

conversion and decimal point alignment is supplied throughout the calculation.

•

The maximum size of each operand is 18 decimal digits.

•

Each arithmetic operation is evaluated using an intermediate data item. If the size of

the result being developed is larger than this intermediate data item, the SCREEN

COBOL program will be suspended by the TCP with an arithmetic overflow error.

The contents of the intermediate data item are moved to the receiving data item

according to the rules of a MOVE statement.

When a sending and receiving item in an arithmetic statement share part of their storage

areas, the result is undefined.

Arithmetic Expressions

An arithmetic expression is one of the following:

•

A numeric elementary item

•

A numeric literal

•

A numeric elementary item and a numeric literal separated by arithmetic operators

•

An arithmetic expression enclosed in parentheses