The format of the dictionary statement is illustrated below.
The following rules apply to constant_names and field_names:
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May consist of 1 through 50 EBCDIC characters.
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May be a combination of uppercase letters (A-Z), lowercase letters (a-z), numbers (0-9), the number sign (#), the dollar sign ($), the commercial at sign (@), the underscore (_), or the hyphen (-).
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May not have a number (0-9) or a hyphen (-) as the first character.
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Are case-sensitive; for example, 'Address', 'ADDRESS', and 'address' are treated as different fields.
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Cannot be an MFX reserved word. The following table lists the MFX reserved words:
Table 1. MFX Reserved Words A DATEDIFF NUM TIME2P AC DATENS OL TIME3 ADD DC1 OR TIME3P ADDDAYS DC2 OT TIMENS ADDMONS DC3 PAGE TM1 ADDYEARS DE1 PAGEHEAD TM2 ALIGN DE2 PD TM3 ALL DE3 PD0 TM4 AND DIV PDC TS AQ DT1 PDF UC ASF DT2 POSITION UFF ASL DT3 PREVDxxx (xxx={SUN,MON,...}) UN AST E PSI UTF8 AUF F PZ UTF16 AVG FD SEQNUM UTF32 BI FI SFF VALCNT CH FL SKIP VLEN CLO FS SS X COPY H SUB XDUP COUNT HEX SUBCOUNT XSUM COUNT15 LASTDAYx (x={M,Q,W,Y}) SUBCOUNT15 Y2x* CSF LC SUBDAYS Y2xx* CSL LN SUBMONS Y4x* CST LS SUBYEARS Z CTO MAX TC1 ZD D MC TC2 ZDC D1 MIN TC3 ZDF D2 MN TC4 ZSI DATE MOD TE1 DATE1 MUL TE2 DATE1P MULTIINDD TE3 DATE2 M0 through M9
TE4 DATE2P M00 through M99 TIME DATE3 NEXTDxxx (xxx={SUN,MON,...}) TIME1 DATE3P NONE TIME1P DATE4 TIME2 DATE5
* x represents any character
All MFX reserved words are in uppercase. Thus, mixed case and lowercase forms of MFX reserved words are permissible as dictionary_names. Similarly, dictionary statement operators POSITION, SKIP and ALIGN are in uppercase; thus mixed and lowercase forms of these words are permissible as dictionary_names. For example, ‘position’, ‘Skip’, and ‘align’ are all acceptable as dictionary_names.
The following sections describe the three types of dictionary statements in detail: