The PROCEDURE DIVISION of a program or method contains the specific instructions for solving a given data processing problem.
The PROCEDURE DIVISION in an object, factory or interface definition contains the invocable methods (for interfaces, only the method prototypes) which apply to an object, a factory object or an interface, respectively.
COBOL instructions are written in the form of statements.
A statement is a syntactically valid combination of words and symbols, beginning with a COBOL verb.
Example of a statement
MOVE A TO B
Several statements may be combined into a sentence, groups of sentences into paragraphs, and one or more paragraphs into a section.
Normally, a COBOL statement refers to user-defined data or procedures by means of data-names or procedure-names. References to user-defined words must be unique (see section "Qualification").
A logical subset of the program, consisting of one or more successive paragraphs or one or more successive sections of the Procedure Division, is called a procedure. A procedure-name is a word which is used for referring to a paragraph or a section; it consists of a paragraph-name (which may be qualified by a section-name) or a section-name.
There are two types of procedures in the Procedure Division:
Declaratives, which cannot be executed within the normal sequence of statements in the Procedure Division.
Nondeclarative procedures that contain statements for normal execution when there are no special exceptional conditions.
The execution of the source unit begins with the first PROCEDURE DIVISION statement following the declaratives. Statements are then executed in the order in which they are presented for compilation, except where the rules for a given statement indicate some other order.
If program segmentation is used, the programmer must divide the entire Procedure Division into named sections. Program segmentation is discussed in chapter "Segmentation".