Structure & coding conventions
PC Metalanguage; the COBOL character set ; coding conventions; divisions, sections, paragraphs, sentences and statements
IDENTIFICATION DIVISIONENVIRONMENT DIVISIONDATA DIVISIONFILE SECTION and WORKING - STORAGE SECTION; FDs; hierarchy and level numbers; elementary and group data items; PICTUREs; the VALUE clause; editing characters; literals, figurative constants.
PROCEDURE DIVISIONMOVE, ADD, SUBTRACT, MULTIPLY, DIVIDE and COMPUTE; PERFORM; ACCEPT and DISPLAY; OPEN and CLOSE; READ and WRITE; file access modes; indexed and relative files.
Conditional statements and branchingIF and ELSE; comparisons and tests; Level 88; negated conditions; nested IFs; GO TO; PERFORM UNTIL; EVALUATE.
Table handling and data representationTables; PERFORM...VARYING; implicit and explicit redefinition; DISPLAY, COMP, COMP-3, SYNC and JUSTIFY; data representation; INITIALIZE.
Additional statements and alternative constructsDECLARATIVES; the CORRESPONDING clause.
Other featuresCOPY; LINKAGE SECTION; CALL; SORT and MERGE.