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. |