ISO2002ENTMF 

In-line Comments

An in-line comment begins with the two contiguous characters "*>" preceded by a separator space, and ends with the last character position of the line. It allows free-form commentary to appear on the same line as character-strings and/or separators. An in-line comment can appear anywhere a separator space can appear in a COBOL compilation group or in a library text of a COBOL library. For the purpose of evaluating library text, pseudo-text and source text, an in-line comment has the value of a single space character. An in-line comment cannot be continued onto another line.