Continuation Characters
When an alphanumeric value is too long to fit on a single line, it can be continued on the next line by using a continuation character. In Listing 2.11, the columns have been included. The message must be continued to the end of Area B (column 72) and ends without a closing quote. The next line begins with a hyphen (-) in column 7 to indicate that the previous quoted string is being continued. The rest of the message starts with a quote and continues as long as is necessary to complete the message. Lines can be continued over more than one line if necessary.
Listing 2.11. The continuation character.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890
000500 01 LONG-MESSAGE PIC X(80) VALUE "This is an incredibly long m
000600- "essage that will take more than one line to define".
Summary
Today, you learned the basics about COBOL's DATA DIVISION, including the following:
· The WORKING-STORAGE SECTION of the DATA DIVISION is used to create space for the variables of a program.
· Variables in WORKING-STORAGE are given names. The names are assigned by the programmer.
· Variables can be named using the uppercase characters A through Z, the digits 0 through 9, and the hyphen (-). The hyphen cannot be the first character of a variable name.
· Variables are divided into two broad classes: alphanumeric and numeric.
· Alphanumeric variables can hold printable characters: A through Z, a through z, 0 through 9, spaces, symbols, and punctuation characters.
· Numeric variables can hold numbers.
· Alphanumeric values must be enclosed in double quotation marks when being moved to variables.
· Numeric values being moved to numeric variables do not require quotation marks.
· The MOVE verb moves an alphanumeric value to an alphanumeric variable and pads the variable with spaces on the right if the value is too short to fill the variable.
· The MOVE verb moves a numeric value to a numeric variable and pads the value on the left with zeroes if the value is too small to fill the variable.
· The DISPLAY verb can display more than one value or variable at a time.
· A COBOL sentence can contain commas for punctuation. They do not affect the behavior of the final program, but they can be included to improve readability.
· A COBOL sentence ends with a period. It can spread over several lines of the source code file, as long as it stays within Area B, columns 12 through 72.
· A continuation character can be used to continue a literal on one or more subsequent lines.
