COBOL Words

COBOL Words are characters like string that can be reserved words or user-defined words. The length can be up to 30 characters. COBOL words must be as from a set of letters, digits, the hyphen, and the underscore.

User-Defined

User-defined words are used for commonly as naming files, operational data, records, big paragraph names, and sections. Alphabets, digits also can hyphen are allowed as forming user-defined words, so cannot use COBOL reserved words.

The types of user-defined words:

Types of User-Defined Words	Defining Rules
alphabet-name class-name condition-name constant-name data-name file-name index-name locale-name mnemonic-name program-name	Each of these words must contain at least one letter
library-name program-name text-name	Each of these words must contain one letter. The starting 10 characters must form a unique word

Reserved Words:

Reserved words are the type predefined words in COBOL, Different types of reserved words that we use as constantly-

• Keywords like Acceptable ADD, ACCEPT, MOVE, etc.
• Special characters commonly words as +, -, *, <, <=, etc
• Figurative constants are commonly unique values like ZERO, SPACES, etc. 

Figurative Constants:

Figurative Constants	Description
HIGH-VALUES	One or more characters that which having highest position in descending order
LOW-VALUES	One or more characters that have zeros in binary representation.
ZERO/ZEROES	One or more zeros depending on the size of the variable
SPACES	One or more having spaces.
QUOTES	Single or double quotes.
ALL literal	Filled the data item with having Literal.