Example: Marketing wants the first line of every page of its departmental sales report to contain the program number, report title, page number, and date. They want the third line of every page to contain an identifying label for each column of data. Each of these lines will begin printing in column one.
To print the page header, the following is coded.
The following figure shows a representation of the header that is generated by the above HEADER2 parameter.
Explanation: The HEADER2 parameter produces the page header shown above. Because no forward spacing is specified, the page header begins on the first line of every page. Each of the HEADER2’s number-colon entries (c:), for example, 1:, indicates the column in which the entry following the colon begins to print. Thus, the literal 'PGM NUMBER 5' is printed beginning in column 1, and so on. The &DATE and the &PAGE entries generate a current date and a consecutive page number, respectively. The date and the page number appear after the labels DATE: and PAGE:, which are specified like the other literals.
The double slashes (//) following the &PAGE entry direct the printer to forward space two lines, that is, to leave one blank line, before printing the next group of literals that constitute the labels for the columns of data.