HP 3000 Manuals

Micro Focus COBOL Language Reference - Additional Topics

Source Programs 

DBCS characters can be used in literals (since literals are data), in
comments and comment-entries, and in user-defined words.  Otherwise the
DBCS directive does not change the range of characters that can be used
in source programs - the program is still written using the COBOL
character set (see the chapter Concepts of COBOL Languagein your Language 
Reference).

MPE/iX 5.0 Documentation