All programming languages have what are known as reserved words. These are the words to which the language has assigned special meanings and they generate the basic structure of how the language itself works. You can’t use reserved words for any purpose within the language than that for which their use is reserved. Not all reserved words are necessarily obvious since most languages allow certain statement constructs that almost never get used and sometimes there are words reserved for use in those statements that you wouldn’t expect. For those interested in programming in COBOL, here’s a list of the Reserved Words for that language.

Tags: cobol, mainframe, reserved words