Passing Parameters to a Called Program

You pass parameters to a program by specifying them in the USING phrase of the CALL statement. For example:

CALL "program-name" USING parameter-1, ..., parameter-n

Similarly the called program specifies the parameters in the USING phrase of its Procedure Division header or its ENTRY statement. The parameters need not have the same names in the called and calling programs, but they must be in the same order. Each parameter must also be declared with the same data type and size in both the called and calling programs.

You can pass parameters in the following formats. You can pass the:

The total size of all the parameters passed must not exceed 1020 bytes, where each BY REFERENCE and BY CONTENT parameter occupies 4 bytes.