Rational Developer for System z
COBOL for Windows, Version 7.5, Programming Guide


Conditional statements

A conditional statement is either a simple conditional statement (IF, EVALUATE, SEARCH) or a conditional statement made up of an imperative statement that includes a conditional phrase or option.

You can end a conditional statement with an implicit or explicit scope terminator. If you end a conditional statement explicitly, it becomes a delimited scope statement (which is an imperative statement).

You can use a delimited scope statement in these ways:

For additional program control, you can use the NOT phrase with conditional statements. For example, you can provide instructions to be performed when a particular exception does not occur, such as NOT ON SIZE ERROR. The NOT phrase cannot be used with the ON OVERFLOW phrase of the CALL statement, but it can be used with the ON EXCEPTION phrase.

Do not nest conditional statements. Nested statements must be imperative statements (or delimited scope statements) and must follow the rules for imperative statements.

The following statements are examples of conditional statements if they are coded without scope terminators:

related concepts
Imperative statements
Scope terminators

related tasks
Selecting program actions

related references
Conditional statements (COBOL for Windows Language Reference)


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