How to continue commands and parameters

Commands can be continued on several records or lines. Except for the last line, each record or line must have a hyphen or a plus sign as the last nonblank character before, or at, the right margin.

A hyphen continues the command. A plus sign continues both the command and a value within the command.

Examples of these two types of continuation are:

DELETE - 
  (ENTRY1 - 
  ENTRY2 - 
  ENTR+  
    Y3) - 
  NONVSAM

A blank record, or a record ending with a complete comment, must end with a continuation mark when it appears in the middle of a command, and when it precedes or follows the THEN and ELSE clauses of an IF command.

IF LASTCC = 0 -
  THEN -
  REPRO ...
  /*COMMENT WITH NO CONTINUATION MARK AFTER*/
  ELSE -
  PRINT ...

Because no continuation mark (hyphen) follows the comments, a null command is assumed. The ELSE keyword will not match the THEN keyword.

Records ending with partial comments must always end with a continuation mark. Only blank characters can appear between a continuation mark and the end of the record.

Exception: The DO-END sequence does not require continuation characters. If you use continuation characters, they can be read as a null command or cause unpredictable results.