Rational Developer for System z
Enterprise COBOL for z/OS, Version 4.1, Language Reference


COBOL words with single-byte characters

A COBOL word is a character-string that forms a user-defined word, a system-name, or a reserved word. The maximum size of a COBOL user-defined word is 30 bytes. The number of characters that can be specified depends on the code page indicated by the compile-time locale.

Except for arithmetic operators and relation characters, each character of a COBOL word is selected from the following set:

The hyphen cannot appear as the first or last character in such words. Most user-defined words (all except section-names, paragraph-names, priority-numbers, and level-numbers) must contain at least one alphabetic character. Priority numbers and level numbers need not be unique; a given specification of a priority-number or level-number can be identical to any other priority-number or level-number.

In COBOL words (but not in the content of alphanumeric, DBCS, and national literals), each lowercase single-byte alphabetic letter is considered to be equivalent to its corresponding single-byte uppercase alphabetic letter.

The following rules apply for all COBOL words:


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