Explain the use of Declaratives in COBOL?
Ans: Declaratives provide special section that are executed when an exceptional condition occurs. They must be grouped together and coded at the beginning of procedure division and the entire procedure division must be divided into sections. The Declaratives start with a USE statement. The entire group of declaratives is preceded by DECLARIVES and followed by END DECLARITIVES in area A. The three types of declaratives are Exception (when error occurs during file handling), Debugging (to debug lines with ‘D’ coded in w-s section) and Label (for EOF or beginning…) declaratives.
