The VALUE OF Clause
The VALUE OF clause specifies the description of an item in the label records
associated with a file.
The VALUE OF clause of the file description entry 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 feature is
explicitly excluded from the X/Open COBOL language definitions and should
not be used in a conforming X/Open COBOL source program.
General Formats


Syntax Rules
- Data-name-1 should be qualified when necessary but cannot be subscripted
or indexed, nor can it be an item described with the USAGE IS INDEX clause.
Data-name-2 must be in the Working-Storage Section.
Literal-2 must be a nonnumeric literal and cannot be a figurative constant.
The VALUE OF FILE-ID clause cannot be used if external-file-reference, data-name-1
or literal-1 has been specified in the ASSIGN clause in the file control entry
(see the topic The File Control Entry in the chapter Environment Division).
General Rules
This clause is documentary only.
The character-string specified in literal-2 or data-name-2 is taken as the
external file-name.