The basic linguistic unit is the character. The COBOL character set consists of 26 uppercase letters, 26 lowercase letters, 10 digits, the space character, and any special characters.
Character |
Meaning |
0 to 9 |
Digit |
A to Z, a to z |
Letters |
'BLANK' |
Space |
+ |
Plus |
- |
Minus (hyphen) |
* |
Asterisk |
/ |
Slash |
= |
Equal sign |
$ or € |
Currency sign (dollar sign/Euro sign) |
, |
Comma (decimal point) |
; |
Semicolon |
. |
Period (decimal point) |
: |
Colon |
" |
Quotation mark |
’ |
Apostrophe |
( |
Left parenthesis |
) |
Right parenthesis |
> |
Greater than |
< |
Less than |
Table 3: COBOL character set
When non-numeric literals, comments or comment lines are used, the character set is extended to comprise the whole alphanumeric character set of the data processing system.
The characters which are permitted for use with each type of string and as separators (delimiters) are defined in the subsections to follow.