HP 3000 Manuals HP 3000 Manuals
Chapter 3 Concepts of a COBOL Program
Program Structure
A COBOL program consists of four divisions:
1. Identification Division- An identification of the program.
2. Environment Division- A description of the equipment to be used to
compile and run the program.
3. Data Division- A description of the data to be processed.
4. Procedure Division- A set of procedures to specify the operations
to be performed on the data.
Each division is divided into sections which are further divided into
paragraphs, which in turn are made up of sentences.
For MF only: A COBOL program can either be a program definition or a
program declaration. A program definition gives details of how a program
is to operate and includes a Procedure Division with a set of procedures
to follow. A program declaration gives details of how a program should
be called; it can be considered as a call prototype and will be used to
validate corresponding calls made in any program definitions occurring
later in the same program source file.