PICTURE clause

The picture clause, almost always abbreviated PIC, defines a field's type and size. It is the most distinctive piece of COBOL syntax and the one to learn first.

The notation is compact. X means any character, so a field of X repeated thirty times holds thirty characters of text. The number 9 means a numeric digit. S marks a field as signed, so it can hold negatives. V marks an implied decimal point, which occupies no storage but tells the program where the decimal sits. Repetition is written in brackets rather than spelled out, so a long field is declared briefly.

There are also editing pictures used for output. These insert commas, decimal points, currency symbols, and turn leading zeros into spaces, so a stored number can be printed in a readable form without any formatting code.

The precision matters. Because COBOL knows the exact size and decimal placement of every numeric field, arithmetic on money behaves predictably, a guarantee that is much harder to get from languages using floating point.