Table of Contents

Unit I The Basics

1 An Introduction to Structured Program Design in COBOL 2

2 The IDENTIFICATION and ENVIRONMENT DIVISIONs 40

3 The DATA DIVISION 62

4 Coding Complete COBOL Programs: The PROCEDURE DIVISION 104

Unit II Designing Structured Programs

5 Designing and Debugging Batch and Interactive COBOL Programs 138

6 Moving Data, Printing Information, and Displaying Output Interactively 184

7 Computing in COBOL: The Arithmetic Verbs and Intrinsic Functions 259

8 Decision Making Using the IF and EVALUATE Statements 302

9 Iteration: Beyond the Basic PERFORM 344

Unit III Writing High-Level COBOL Programs

10 Control Break Processing 386

11 Data Validation 435

12 Array Processing and Table Handling 472

Unit IV File Maintenance

13 Sequential File Processing 562

14 Sorting and Merging 617

15 Indexed and Relative File Processing 645

Unit V Advanced Topics

16 Improving Program Productivity Using the COPY, CALL, and Other Statements 712

17 The Report Writer Module 737

Appendixes

A COBOL Character Set and Reserved Words A-2

B Differences Among the COBOL Standards A-7

C Glossary A-11

Index I-1