COBOL for the 21st Century

Appendix A. COBOL Character Set and Reserved Words

See the COBOL Syntax Reference Guide that accompanies this book for full Instruction Formats.

COBOL CHARACTERS

The following lists are in ascending order:

	EBCDIC		ASCII
. < ( + $ * ) ; - / , > ' = " a–z A–Z 0–9	space period, decimal point less than left parenthesis plus symbol dollar sign asterisk, multiplication right parenthesis semicolon hyphen, minus sign slash, division comma greater than single quotation mark equal sign quotation mark lowercase letters uppercase letters digits	" $ ' ( ) * + , - . / 0–9 ; < = > A–Z a–z	space quotation mark dollar sign single quotation mark left parenthesis right parenthesis asterisk, multiplication plus symbol comma hyphen, minus sign period, decimal point slash, division digits semicolon less than equal sign greater than uppercase letters lowercase letters

COBOL RESERVED WORDS

Each COBOL compiler has a list of reserved words that:

1. Includes all entries in the ANS COBOL standard.

2. Includes additional entries not part of the standard but that are either VAX or IBM compiler extensions. These are called enhancements.

You may find that your computer has additional reserved words. Diagnostic messages will print if you are using a reserved word incorrectly.

Reserved words that are not relevant for COBOL 74 are denoted with a single asterisk (*). COBOL 74 reserved words that are not reserved in the new standard are denoted with a double asterisk (**). Words marked with a (V) are VAX COBOL 85 extensions. Words ...