Charles, Usually questions like these can be easily looked up in the Programming Langauge Reference Guides.
If you go to the IBM website to the cobol webpage you can find the Library with this and other helpful manuals for COBOL http://www-01.ibm.com/software/awdtools/cobol/zos/ Lizette -----Original Message----- >From: Charles Mills <[email protected]> >Sent: Aug 3, 2012 8:40 AM >To: [email protected] >Subject: Is this valid COBOL syntax? > >Is anyone a COBOL syntax expert? Is the following valid? (It's not a trick >question: there are no obscure PARM= options and nothing remarkable precedes >the fragment below.) It's not an academic question. The code is accepted >without error by the IBM Enterprise COBOL compiler V4.1, but not by a >proprietary pre-processor, and I'm trying to figure out if the code should >change or if the preprocessor is in error. Changing the code is not trivial: >multiple programs like this, corporate change control processes, etc., etc. > > > >I think it's invalid, that the '.' strings are syntactically-invalid >character literals. Am I missing something? > > > >Starting hint: The REMARKS paragraph heading is only a * comment and not >syntactically significant (I think). > > > >Best viewed in a fixed-width font like Courier. FYI if you can't view it >that way, the leading quote in lines 20-23 is in CC 12 and the trailing >quote in CC 72. > > > >Card columns: > > 1 2 3 6 7 > >1234567890123456789012345678901...0123456789012 > > > >00020 *REMARKS. > >00021 '******************* ************' > >00022 '* VARIOUS COMMENT-LIKE TEXT *' > >00023 '* VARIOUS COMMENT-LIKE TEXT *' > > > >Thanks for your help. > > > >Charles > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
