DISPLAY statement

Remarks#

The DISPLAY statement causes data to be transferred to hardware or software of the operating environment. DISPLAY comes in two forms, UPON device or for display of SCREEN data. Environment variables can also be set with DISPLAY UPON in some implementations of COBOL, along with other extensions for data transfer of graphics or other device specific needs.

DISPLAY UPON

DISPLAY "An error occurred with " tracked-resource UPON SYSERR

DISPLAY A, B, C UPON CONSOLE

DISPLAY group-data UPON user-device
    ON EXCEPTION
        WRITE device-exception-notice
    NOT ON EXCEPTION
        WRITE device-usage-log
END-DISPLAY

UPON CONSOLE is a default, rarely written. Messages with DISPLAY are one way of debugging COBOL code, but many COBOL programs are transactional in nature, and might not ever interact with a human operator once a job is submitted.