National Literals
A national literal is a string of national characters represented in the storage of the computer as characters of a uniform
size. See your COBOL system documentation on national data (Unicode) for further information.
General Formats for Format 1
General Formats for Format 2 for National Literals
Syntax Rules for All Formats
- The length of a national literal, excluding the separators that delimit the literal, must be greater than zero and less than or equal to 160 national character positions.
- Character 1 can be any character in the alphanumeric coded character set such that a correspondence exists between that alphanumeric character and a national character.
Syntax Rules for Format 1
- Two contiguous quotation symbol characters matching the quotation symbol used in the opening delimiter represent a single occurrence of that quotation symbol character in the content of the literal. The two contiguous quotation symbol characters must be in the same coded character set representation as the opening quotation symbol.
Syntax Rules for Format 2
- Each hex-character-sequence-1 must consist of four hexadecimal digits (two bytes) coded with the high-order byte first
General Rules for All Formats
- The separators that delimit the national literal are not included in the value of the national literal.
- National literals are of the class and category national.
General Rules for Format 1
- The value of the literal at compile time is the string of occurrences of character-1 represented in the computer’s compile-time
coded character set.
The value of the literal at runtime is the string of national characters that results from converting the compile-time value of the literal to its runtime equivalent.
General Rules for Format 2
- The value of the literal at runtime is a string of national characters, each of which has the bit configuration specified by one occurrence of hex-character-sequence-1.