Open PL/I is a block-structured language. Each block consists of a group of statements. Statements are used to declare constants and variables, and to express actions to be performed by your program. For example:
READ FILE (G) INTO (Y) ;
In this example, the READ statement reads the next record in file G into storage Y.
Each Open PL/I statement consists of a series of elements ending with a semicolon. These elements can be PL/I keywords, user-specified identifiers, literal constants, or punctuation symbols.