ILE COBOL Language Reference

Paragraph

A paragraph consists of a paragraph-name followed by a separator period,

optionally followed by one or more sentences.

A paragraph-name is a user-defined word that identifies a paragraph. A paragraph-name, because it can be qualified, need not be unique. The paragraph-name must begin in Area A. A paragraph ends immediately before the next paragraph-name or section header, or at the end of the Procedure Division. In the declaratives portion, a paragraph ends immediately before the next paragraph, the next USE statement, or at the keywords END DECLARATIVES. If one paragraph in a program is contained within a section, all paragraphs of the program must be contained in sections.

Sentence

A sentence consists of one or more statements terminated by a separator period.

Statement

A statement is a syntactically valid combination of identifiers and symbols (literals, relational-operators, and so forth) beginning with a COBOL verb.

Execution begins with the first statement in the Procedure Division, excluding declaratives. Statements are executed in the order in which they are presented for compilation, unless the statement rules dictate some other order of execution.

The Procedure Division ends at the physical end of the program; that is, the physical position in a source program after which no further statements appear.

Identifier

An identifier is a syntactically correct combination of a data-name, with its qualifiers, subscripts, and reference modifiers as required for uniqueness of reference, that names a data item. In any Procedure Division reference (except the class test or function argument in a test intrinsic function), the contents of an identifier must be compatible with the class specified through its PICTURE or FORMAT clause, or results are unpredictable.


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