Data Division—Data Description Entry

A data description entry specifies the characteristics of a data item. Data items have attributes, which may be either implicit (default values), or explicit.

This section describes the coding of data description entries and record description entries (which are sets of data description entries). The single term data description entry is used in this section to refer to data and record description entries.

Data description entries that define independent data items do not make up a record. These are known as data item description entries.

The data description entry has four general formats.
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