CONTINUE Statement
CONTINUE Statement
The CONTINUE statement transfers the control to the immediate COBOL statement that comes next in the program flow. It is a no-operation, and it is a do-nothing statement. It serves no functional purpose in terms of processing logic.
Syntax -
CONTINUE
Points to Note -
- CONTINUE statement is allowed to code only in the conditional statements like IF, IF..ELSE and EVALAUTE.
- It is a statement to satisfy syntactic requirements or to improve code readability.
Practical Example -
Scenario - Add 2000 to salary if it is less than 5000.
Code -
----+----1----+----2----+----3----+----4----+----5----+
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. CONTSTMT.
AUTHOR. MTH.
DATA DIVISION.
WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
01 WS-VAR.
05 WS-SALARY PIC 9(04).
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
* Accepting Salary amount from input
ACCEPT WS-SALARY.
* Salary is greater than 5000, do nothing
IF WS-SALARY GREATER THAN 5000
CONTINUE
ELSE
COMPUTE WS-SALARY = WS-SALARY + 2000
END-IF.
* Displaying Salary
DISPLAY "SALARY: " WS-SALARY.
STOP RUN.
Run JCL -
//MATESYD JOB MSGLEVEL=(1,1),NOTIFY=&SYSUID //* //STEP01 EXEC PGM=CONTSTMT //STEPLIB DD DSN=MATESY.COBOL.LOADLIB,DISP=SHR //SYSOUT DD SYSOUT=* //SYSIN DD * 6000 /*
Output -
SALARY: 6000
Explaining example -
In the above example, the input salary is 6000 which is greater than 5000. So, the CONTINUE gets executed and control transfers to the next statement in the flow (DISPLAY statement).