Industry Standards

ILE COBOL is designed to support Standard COBOL. Standard COBOL refers to the COBOL programming language as defined in the document entitled American National Standard for Information Systems - Programming Language - COBOL, ANSI X3.23-1985, ISO 1989:1985, updated with the content of the following documents, in the order they are listed:
  • ANSI X3.23a-1989, American National Standard for Information Systems - Programming Language - Intrinsic Function Module for COBOL and ISO 1989:1985/ Amd.1:1992
  • Programming Languages - COBOL, AMENDMENT 1: Intrinsic function module
  • ANSI X3.23b-1993, American National Standard for Information Systems - Programming Language - Correction Amendment for COBOL
  • ISO/IEC 1989 DAM2 Programming Languages - COBOL, AMENDMENT 2: Correction and clarification amendment for COBOL.
  • FIPS Publication 21-4, Federal Information Processing Standard 21-4, COBOL

From this point on, the term Standard COBOL will be used to refer to the ANSI standard just described.

Portions of this manual are copied from the X3.23b-1993, American National Standard for Information Systems - Programming Language - COBOL and ISO 1989:1985/Amd 2:1994, Programming languages - COBOL and are reproduced with permission from these publications (copyright 1985 by the American National Standards Institute), copies of which you can purchase from the American National Standard Institute at 1430 Broadway, New York, New York, 10018.

The COBOL language is maintained by the ANSI Technical Committee X3J4.

Refer to Appendix A of the IBM Rational Development Studio for i: ILE COBOL Programmer's Guide for more information on the industry standards supported by the ILE COBOL compiler.