Re: gnubol: DIVISION/SECTION headers.

[Randall Bart <Barticus@att.net>]

At 06:57 PM 11/15/99 , Tim Josling wrote:

>Randall Bart wrote:
>
> > BTW, Tim, you would expand that COPY, right?  Don't worry, that's not
> > necessarily wrong.
>
>The standard specifically says a copy in a comment-entry is part of the
>comment-entry not a copy, so I don't expand it.

I wasn't aware of that.  I don't have a copy of Cobol-85.  I only have 
drafts of Cobol-20XX, and it doesn't have the comment paragraphs.

>Basically since I found that ". " does not end a comment-entry, a
>comment-entry has to be ended by something in area a. There is no other
>way that I can see. As Randall pointed out, you can have all sorts of
>rubbish - I think even unbalanced quotes are allowed. RB will tell me if
>I am wrong - actually I don't want to know :-).

Unbalanced quotes are allowed by some compilers.  I believe the standard is 
vague on the issue.  The comment can contain any character and a quote is a 
character.  Period is a character, too.

> > A header must be on its own
> > line; other areas of the language are not line based.
>
>Where does it say that?

I made it up; there's no such rule.  I must be remembering a rule from some 
Cobol-85 compiler which was otherwise free-form.  I just verified with J4 
that this is a valid line according to the draft:

01 DATA-FIELD PIC XXX. PROCEDURE DIVISION. THE-FIRST SECTION. PERFORM ABC.

--
RB |\  Randall Bart
aa |/  Barticus@usa.net 818-985-3259 Barticus@att.net
nr |\  8321 Burnet Av #1, North Hills, CA 91343
dt ||\
a   |/ Y2K website:    http://users.aol.com/PanicYr00
l   |\
l   |/ DOT-HS-808-065     I Love You    MS^7=6/28/107

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