Concatenation of character string values
Character expressions can be concatenated to each other or to substring notations in any order. The resulting value is a character string composed of the concatenated parts. This concatenated string can then be used in the operand field of a SETC instruction, or as a value for comparison in a logical expression.
You need the concatenation character (a period) to separate the apostrophe that ends one character expression from the apostrophe that begins the next.
For example, either of the following statements can be used to assign the character value
ABCDEF
to the SETC symbol &BETA
.
&BETA SETC 'ABCDEF'
&BETA SETC 'ABC'.'DEF'