Imperative statements and imperative sentences

• An imperative statement causes a specific action to be carried out in the object program.

• An imperative statement is a statement which begins with an imperative verb and specifies that an action is to be executed unconditionally or a conditional statement which is delimited by its explicit scope terminator.

• An imperative statement may consist of a sequence of imperative statements, each separated from the next by a COBOL separator.
  The imperative statements are:

  ACCEPT (7) ADD (1) ALLOCATE ALTER CALL (6) CANCEL CLOSE CLOSE DOCUMENT COMPUTE (1) CONTINUE DELETE (2) DISPLAY (7) DIVIDE (1) EXIT

  FREE GENERATE GO TO INITIALIZE INITIATE INSPECT INVOKE (7) MERGE MOVE MULTIPLY (1) OPEN OPEN DOCUMENT (8) PERFORM RAISE

  READ (4) RELEASE RESUME REWRITE (2) SET SORT START (2) STOP STRING (3) SUBTRACT (1) TERMINATE UNSTRING (3) WRITE (5) XML (7)

  (1)	without the (NOT) ON SIZE ERROR phrase
  (2)	without the (NOT) INVALID KEY phrase
  (3)	without the (NOT) ON OVERFLOW phrase
  (4)	without the (NOT) AT END or (NOT) INVALID KEY phrase
  (5)	without the (NOT) INVALID KEY or (NOT) END-OF-PAGE phrase
  (6)	without the ON OVERFLOW or (NOT) ON EXCEPTION phrase
  (7)	without the (NOT) ON EXCEPTION phrase
  (8)	without the (NOT) AT END phrase

• Whenever "imperative-statement" occurs in the general format of statements, it also refers to a sequence of imperative statements terminated either by a period or by a phrase that belongs to a statement that contains an imperative statement. For example, the statement

  DIVIDE A INTO B.

  is an imperative statement because of the period that concludes it,

  as is DIVIDE in

   

  READ D AT END
         DIVIDE A INTO B
         NOT AT END ...
  

  because of “NOT ...” .

• An imperative sentence is an imperative statement which is terminated by a period followed immediately by a space.