Subscripting is a method of providing table references through the use of subscripts. A subscript is a positive integer whose value specifies the occurrence number of a table element.
Subscripting is related to the OCCURS clause through the number of dimensions in a table. For example, a 4-dimensional table will require four subscripts. You may think of subscripting as the COBOL way of identifying elements in a multidimensional array, which was defined through the OCCURS clause.
For detailed information, see Subscripting.