Statements

This section describes the function and syntax of the ACS language statements that you can use when writing ACS routines.

The continuation characters “+” and “-” allow you to extend literal constants to the next line. To ignore the leading blanks on the following line, use “+”. If you want to include the leading blanks on the next line as part of a literal, then use a “-”. You cannot continue masks, numbers, KB or MB numerics, or keywords.

The maximum number of nesting levels for any combination of ACS statement types is thirty-two. (For example, a nested IF statement is one that appears within an IF statement.)

Comments begin with a slash-asterisk pair, “/*”, and end with an asterisk-slash pair, “*/”.

You can place comments anywhere within an ACS routine where a delimiter might appear.
Comments cannot be nested; each comment ends at the first occurrence of an asterisk-slash pair, “*/”.
Asterisks within the comment statement are treated as a special character. A maximum of 500 asterisks can be included in a single comment statement (multiple comment lines not ended with “*/”). This could affect the number of lines allowed in comment continuation.

The statement types are defined as follows:

PROC: Start of an ACS routine
FILTLIST: Definition of filter criteria
SET: Assigns a value to a read-write variable
DO: Start of statement group
IF: Provides conditional statement execution
SELECT: Defines a set of conditional execution statements
EXIT: Causes immediate termination of the ACS routine and can be used to force allocation failures
WRITE: Sends a message to the end user
END: End of statement group (DO or SELECT) or ACS routine (PROC).