Technical data

Procedure Division

The Procedure Division of your COBOL database programs may contain

declarative and nondeclarative procedures. These may include:

• Directive and imperative statements

• Conditional statements

• Database key identiﬁers

• Explicit and implicit scope terminators

• Section 4.6, on record selection expressions

4.1 COBOL Statements for the Database Programmer

There are four types of COBOL statements:

• Compiler-directing statements specify an action taken by the compiler during

compilation.

• Imperative statements specify an unconditional action taken by the object

program at run time.

• Conditional statements specify a conditional action taken by the object

program at run time; the action depends upon a truth value that is generated

by the program. (A truth value is either a yes or no answer to the question,

‘‘Is the condition true?’’)

• Delimited-scope statements specify their explicit scope terminator.

Table 4–1 shows the three types of COBOL statements (conditional, imperative,

delimited-scope) that are considered particularly relevant to database

programming.

Procedure Division 4–1