Continuation of Lines

Whenever a sentence, entry, phrase, or clause requires more than one line, it can be continued by starting subsequent line(s) in area B. These subsequent lines are called the continuation line(s). Any word, literal

ANS85 or PICTURE character-string

can be broken in such a way that part of it appears on a continuation line.

A hyphen in the indicator area of a line indicates that the first nonblank character in area B of the current line is the successor of the last nonblank character of the preceding line

ANS85 excluding intervening comment or blank lines

without any intervening space. However, if the continued line contains a nonnumeric literal without closing quotation mark, the first nonblank character in area B on the continuation line must be a quotation mark, and the continuation starts with the character immediately after that quotation mark. All spaces at the end of the continued line are considered part of the literal. Area A of a continuation line must be blank.

If there is no hyphen in the indicator area of a line, it is assumed that the last character in the preceding line is followed by a space. Both characters composing the separator "==" must be on the same line.

VSC2MF Characters X" and G" must be on the same line.

MF Characters H" must be on the same line.

MFCOB370 Characters N" must be on the same line.

MFXOPEN Characters *> must be on the same line.

ISO2002 Characters >> must be on the same line.