Ask Felgall

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.

Whether you are using Cobol or PL/1 the calls that you make from a batch program to an IMS database will be almost the same. This reference page lists all of the parameters you need to pass to the call along with the values that can be used for many of those parameters and what those values mean.

IMS Calls

One of the types of page that I occasionally add to the site are reference pages where I list all of the commands or options available when using a particular language. One page I wrote some time ago was one listing all of the commands that can be used in COBOL.

Procedure Division Statements

I spent over twenty years programming mainframe computers using either Cobol or Pl/1 (depending on where I was working at the time). As a result, when I set up my computer help site,, a large section of the site was dedicated to answering mainframe questions.

With the outsourcing of most of the mainframe programming jobs to India I found myself unable to find more mainframe work a few years ago and have since moved on to other things. The mainframe section of the site is still one of the few sources of information about mainframe computers on the web and I still regularly get questions (mostly from people in India) about how to do various things with mainframes.

I still have a number of mainframe books in my collection and so am able to look up some of the information that I can no longer directly remember in order to be able to answer most of those questions.

Mainframes