HP DDL D40 Reference Manual page 76

Definitions and Records
Level Number Guidelines
Level numbers must conform to the following rules:
The DEFINITION statement does not have a level number; it is implicitly at the
01 level.
Each group and field within a group DEFINITION statement has a level number to
indicate its relationship to other groups and fields within the group. A group of level
n includes all following groups and fields with level numbers greater than n up to
the next group or field of level n or less.
Level numbers need not be assigned sequentially. For instance, an 02 group can
contain two 05 fields with no intervening 03 or 04 levels.
If a field is defined by a TYPE clause that refers to a group definition, the field's
level number replaces the implicit level 01 number of the referenced definition, and
the level numbers of the definition's member fields are adjusted accordingly.
If a field is defined by a TYPE clause that refers to a previous definition, the level
number of any element following the field must be less than or equal to the level
number of the field.
Definition Length Guidelines
A definition's length must conform to the following rules:
If a definition is used only for working storage, its length or the length of any field
within the definition is limited to 32,767 bytes.
If a RECORD statement refers to a definition, the length of the definition is subject
to the maximum record-length limitations.
The length of a definition is limited further by the following languages:
255 bytes for FORTRAN
5,000 bytes for TACL
32,766 bytes for Pascal
4,096 bytes for COBOL
DEFINITION Statement Examples
Following are examples of the different forms of the DEFINITION statement.
Field Definitions:
DEF company-name
DEF custnum
DEF status TYPE ENUM BEGIN .
89 no-error .
89 read-error VALUE 3 .
Data Definition Language (DDL) Reference Manual—426798-002
TYPE CHARACTER 30
PIC 9(6) HEADING "Customer/Number" .
5- 10
NULL 0 .
Syntax Elements