HP 3000 Manuals HP 3000 Manuals
Sentences, Statements, and Clauses Within a paragraph, sentences (in the PROCEDURE DIVISION) and entries (in the IDENTIFICATION, ENVIRONMENT, and DATA DIVISIONs) may appear. Within a sentence, in turn, one or more statements can be written. These items provide a further syntactic breakdown of your program. In structure, they closely resemble their English language counterparts. A sentence is a sequence of one or more statements, with the last statement terminated by a period followed by a space. A statement is a syntactically valid combination of words and symbols, beginning with a verb such as ADD, READ, or DISPLAY. An entry is any descriptive set of consecutive clauses terminated by a separator period and written in the IDENTIFICATION DIVISION, ENVIRONMENT DIVISION, or DATA DIVISION of a COBOL program. All of these items are explained further in the descriptions of the divisions in which they appear. In Figure 2-2 , the PROCEDURE DIVISION begins with a sentence that contains a single statement: MOVE ZEROS TO TOTAL COST. (item 10). Another example is the sentence shown below, which contains two statements:Click here to view figure. A clause is an ordered set of character strings (sequences of characters) that specify an attribute of an entry in the program. In Figure 2-2 , the IDENTIFICATION DIVISION contains the clauses COBOL-F1D3 (item 11) and ARTHUR-JONES (item 12). Statements and entries may also include phrases and clauses. A phrase is a sequence of one or more consecutive character strings that form a portion of a statement or clause. In the example below, the characters RED-DATA OF COLOR-DATA form a phrase: MOVE RED-DATA OF COLOR-DATA TO FORM-DATA.