Character set
The character set of PRODAMP consists of
letters
special characters
digits
separators.
With regard to letters, string literals and comments are the only case where PRODAMP makes a distinction between uppercase and lowercase.
Separators
Whenever the names, numbers, etc. in a sequence are not separated by special characters, such characters must be inserted. Possible separator characters are blanks and comments.
A comment can contain any characters and is delimited by double quotes ("). Comments do not affect program execution; they serve simply to facilitate reading.
Names
Names (identifiers) are required in order to identify the various objects which can be used in a procedure (variables, subroutines, etc.).
They are made up of letters, digits, the characters $, # or @ and the underscore character (“_”), which can only be present once.
The first character must be a letter or one of the characters $, # or @, and the last character must not be an underscore. Furthermore, names must not be word symbols (operator, name of a statement, etc.). Names can be up to 31 characters in length.
Examples
HUGO X123 A_ONE @LABEL T#1234 THIS_IS_AN_EXTREMELY_LONG_NAME
Length of source code lines
End-of-line characters have no meaning in the PRODAMP language. Nevertheless, the following rules should be observed:
Program lines should only be created with a maximum of 72 characters in the editor. If a line contains less than 72 lines, it must not end in the middle of an identifier, a literal etc.
When the PRODAMP source code is loaded into a PRODAMP window for compilation, line breaks are added to lines with more than 72 characters. Then lines with less than 72 characters are padded with blanks until they are 72 characters in length and lowercase characters outside strings and comments are converted to uppercase.