COBOL Control statements

• COBOL programming language uses control statements to cause the flow of execution to advance and branch based on changes to the state of a program
• COBOL’s program control statements can be put into the following categories:- Selection, Iteration and Jump
  • Selection statement allows your program to choose different paths of execution based on the output of conditional expression or the status of variable. COBOL supports two selection statement:
    • IF
    • EVALUATE
    Conditional expression can take one of the following form:-
    • Relation condition
    • Sign condition
    • Class condition
    • Condition-name condition
    • Negated single condition
    • Combined condition
  • Iteration statement allows program execution to repeat one or more statements (i.e. iteration statements form loops). COBOL supports one iteration statement:
    • PERFORM
  • Jump statement allows your program to execute in a non-linear fashion. COBOL supports few jump statements such as:
    • CONTINUE
    • NEXT SENTENCE
    • GO TO
• We will be discussing all of them in detail in upcoming section