Number
Formats
Moving and Editing data
Initializing data
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
A large portion of any COBOL program consists of the data division and how the
data is defined and manipulated. As already described in the previous section ,
each identifier used in the procedure division must be defined. How they are
defined depends of what is to be performed on that data.
More on data definition for tables (arrays), Boolean data,
and for writing printing data, is discussed in the following section
The MOVE verb is used extensively in COBOL to manipulate
data and so is introduced here. As the name suggests, MOVE simply tells the
computer to place a certain item of data to a specified identifier. a typical
statement would be of the form:
MOVE [identifier or literal] TO [identifier-1] [identifier-2]...
