The SHIFT-OUT and SHIFT-IN special registers are supported only when compiling with the CHAR(EBCDIC) compiler option. However, their values are not recognized as delimiters for double-byte characters in the code pages supported for COBOL for Windows.
The SHIFT-OUT and SHIFT-IN special registers are implicitly defined as alphanumeric data items of the format:
01 SHIFT-OUT GLOBAL PICTURE X(1) USAGE DISPLAY VALUE X“0E”. 01 SHIFT-IN GLOBAL PICTURE X(1) USAGE DISPLAY VALUE X“0F”.
When used in nested programs, these special registers are implicitly defined with the global attribute in the outermost program.
These special registers represent EBCDIC shift-out and shift-in control characters, which are unprintable characters.
You can specify the SHIFT-OUT and SHIFT-IN special registers in a function wherever an alphanumeric argument is allowed.
These special registers cannot be receiving items. SHIFT-OUT and SHIFT-IN cannot be used in place of the keyboard control characters when you are defining multibyte user-defined words or specifying EBCDIC DBCS literals.