Character Set:

To study any language, first one should know the alphabets of the language and they are termed as character set in general. There are 50 different characters in the COBOL character set.

They are listed as below:

0-9               (10 numerals)

A-Z              (26 English alphabets-only capital letters)

-                  (hyphen or minus sign)

+                  (Plus sign)

*                  (Asterisk)

/                   (Slash)

0=                (Equal sign)

$                  (Currency sign)

,                   (Comma)

;                   (Semi colon)

.                (Period or decimal point)

"                (Quotation mark)

(                (Left Parenthesis)

)                (Right Parenthesis)

>              (Greater than symbol)

<               (Less than symbol)

The characters 0-9 are known as numeric characters or digits. The characters A-Z are known as letters and the remaining characters are known as special characters. The space or blank character in many cases is treated as a letter.