Q&A
Q Why is so much of COBOL in uppercase?
A COBOL was developed in the days when computer terminals and keypunch machines used only uppercase letters. The entire language was defined in terms of this all-uppercase state of affairs. You can display uppercase and lowercase messages, such as Hello world, because terminals now have uppercase and lowercase capability. However, the actual elements of COBOL--the DIVISIONs, the paragraph names such as PROGRAM-BEGIN, and the verbs such as DISPLAY--originally were designed in uppercase only.
Q What does a blank line in a program do?
A Nothing. The compiler skips blank lines. You can put blank lines anywhere you want in the program to improve readability.
Q Does COBOL use line numbers?
A Yes, but they are optional. Most compilers ignore them or can be set to ignore them. Some compilers on larger computers will process the line numbers and provide a warning if the line numbers are out of sequence, but this is not an error.
Q Can I put anything in a comment?
A Yes. As long as the asterisk appears at column 7, everything after the asterisk is ignored and has no effect on the compiler. You can write English sentences or gobbledygook, although the usual practice is to provide some information that describes what the program is doing, or why it is doing it.
You can do this on as many lines as necessary to complete the comment.
Q Will my comments appear in the program when it runs?
A No. Comments appear only in the source code file, and they will not be included in the compiled program. Comments are intended to document the source code. The computer can read only the compiled code, and the comments wouldn't mean anything to the computer, so they are not included in the resulting program.
Q Why do paragraph names have hyphens in them?
A Paragraph names in COBOL are limited to 30 characters and may only contain uppercase letters (A through Z), digits (0 through 9), and the hyphen (-). The hyphen is used to improve the readability of paragraphs and the names of data (which is covered in Day 2). Some modern compilers allow paragraph names, division names, and other elements of COBOL to be typed in lowercase.
