Picture character terms and picture strings

Picture character terms define the format of date and time fields. A picture string is a template that indicates the format of the input data. For example, the format of the date 06/16/1990 (where 06 is the month, 16 is the day, and 1990 is the year) corresponds to the picture string MM/DD/YYYY. See z/OS Language Environment Programming Reference for the Language Environment picture character term and picture string values.