This book presents the syntax of COBOL for MVS & VM, COBOL Set for AIX, and VisualAge COBOL (collectively referred to in this book as IBM COBOL). To indicate platform-specific information, this book use the following methods:
- Prefix the text with platform-specific indicators (for example, Under AIX, OS/2, and Windows...)
- Add parenthetical qualifications (for example, (Workstation only))
Note: This book documents extensions for object-oriented COBOL. Object-oriented COBOL is not supported on VM.
Use this book in conjunction with the IBM COBOL Programming Guide for your platform.
Characters
The most basic and indivisible unit of the COBOL language is the character. The IBM COBOL character set includes the letters of the alphabet, digits, and special characters. The complete set of characters that form the IBM COBOL character set is shown in Table 1.
The basic IBM COBOL language is restricted to the character set shown in Table 1, but the content of nonnumeric literals, comment lines, comment entries, and data can include any of the characters from the character set of the computer.