The ALTER Statement
The ALTER statement modifies a predetermined sequence of operations.
The ALTER statement is classed as an obsolete element in the ANSI'85 standard
and is scheduled to be deleted from the next full revision of the ANSI Standard.
All dialects in this COBOL implementation fully support this syntax. The
FLAGSTD Compiler directive can be used to detect all occurrences of this syntax.
Although it is a part of the standard COBOL definition, this verb is explicitly
excluded from the X/Open COBOL language definitions and should not be used
in a conforming X/Open COBOL source program.
General Format

Syntax Rules
- Each procedure-name-1, procedure-name-3, ..., is the name of a paragraph
that contains a single sentence consisting of a GO TO statement without the
DEPENDING phrase.
- Each procedure-name-2, procedure-name-4, ..., is the name of a paragraph
or section in the Procedure Division.
General Rules
- Execution of the ALTER statement modifies the GO TO statement in the paragraph
named procedure-name-1, procedure-name-3, ..., so that subsequent executions
of the modified GO TO statements cause transfer of control to procedure-name-2,
procedure-name-4, ..., respectively. Modified GO TO statements in independent
segments can, under some circumstances, be returned to their initial states
(see the section Independent Segments in the topic Segmentation.
- A GO TO statement in a section whose segment-number is greater than or equal
to 50 must not be referred to by an ALTER statement in a section with a different
segment-number.
All other uses of the ALTER statement are valid and are performed even if
procedure-name-1, procedure-name-3 is in an overlayable fixed segment.