NCL Statement Types and Syntax › Format of NCL Statements › Statement Continuations

Statement Continuations

Statements could require more than the 72 characters available in a single record. To accommodate this, NCL supports the continuation of a statement across multiple consecutive lines. Use of continuations can assist in improving the layout of a procedure and simplify future modification.

The number of continuations is limited to a total statement length of 2048 characters, before variable substitution.

A continuation is indicated when the last non-blank character on a statement (not including the optional sequence number in columns 73 to 80) is a plus (+) sign.

When a continuation is detected, the plus sign is removed and the text of the next statement is concatenated to the statement that contained the plus sign, after stripping leading blanks. This concatenation continues until a statement is found that does not have a plus sign as the last non-blank character.

Example 1: Statement Continuations

&FILE GET ID=MYFILE OPT=KEQ VARS=(A,B,+   -* DATE, TIME
                                          -* and NAME
  C,D,E,F,G,+                             -* ADDRESS
                                          -* DETAILS
  H,I,J)                                  -* EQUIPMENT
                                          -* DETAILS

would result in the statement:

&FILE GET ID=MYFILE OPT=KEQ VARS=(A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J)

Example 2: Statement Continuations

Continuation is deactivated by the &CONTROL NOCONT statement. This may be necessary in procedures where a plus sign is used to set a function key where the plus sign also indicates an implied blank. In such cases, these statements should be preceded by an &CONTROL statement that deactivates continuation processing and followed by another that reactivates it.

&CONTROL NOCONT
PF5 PREF,MSG USER1+
&CONTROL CONT

The CONT and NOCONT operands of the &CONTROL verb cannot be coded as variables.