Euro Currency Sign
A currency symbol represents a monetary value. It’s inserted into data items used as receiving items and removed from data items used as sending items for numeric or numeric-edited receivers. Currency sign values typically identify the monetary units stored in a data item, for example, ‘$’, ‘EUR’, ‘CHF’, ‘JPY’, ‘HK$’, ‘HKD’, or even hexadecimal representations like X’9F’ for the Euro Currency Sign (€) in some EBCDIC code pages.
The CURRENCY SIGN clause in programming languages like COBOL allows developers to specify a currency sign value and its corresponding symbol used in a PICTURE clause. This clause provides flexibility beyond default currency symbols. Multiple CURRENCY SIGN clauses can exist within the SPECIAL-NAMES paragraph, each defining a different currency symbol. Importantly, currency symbols are case-sensitive, meaning ‘D’ and ‘d’ would be interpreted as distinct symbols.
When the PICTURE SYMBOL phrase is omitted, the CURRENCY SIGN clause defines both the currency sign value and its symbol using a single-character alphanumeric literal. This literal is restricted from using digits 0-9, specific uppercase and lowercase letters (A, B, C, D, E, G, N, P, R, S, U, V, X, Z, and their lowercase counterparts), spaces, and common special characters like +, -, ‘,’, ‘.’, ‘*’, ‘/’, ‘;’, ‘(‘, ‘)’, ‘”‘, ‘=’, and ”’. However, lowercase letters like ‘f’, ‘h’, ‘i’, ‘j’, ‘k’, ‘l’, ‘m’, ‘o’, ‘q’, ‘t’, ‘w’, and ‘y’ are permitted.
Conversely, when the PICTURE SYMBOL phrase is included, the CURRENCY SIGN clause specifies the currency sign value while literal-7 in the PICTURE SYMBOL phrase defines the currency symbol. In this case, the currency sign value can be one or more characters but cannot contain digits 0-9 or the special characters ‘+’, ‘-‘, ‘.’, and ‘,’. The PICTURE SYMBOL itself must be a single-byte alphanumeric character, excluding figurative constants, digits 0-9, specific alphabetic characters (A, B, C, D, E, G, N, P, R, S, U, V, X, Z and their lowercase equivalents), the space character, and various special characters (+, -, ‘,’, ‘.’, ‘*’, ‘/’, ‘;’, ‘(‘, ‘)’, ‘”‘, ‘=’, ”’).
The CURRENCY SIGN clause overrides compiler options like CURRENCY and NOCURRENCY. If the CURRENCY SIGN clause is absent and the NOCURRENCY option is active, the dollar sign ($) becomes the default currency sign and symbol. This mechanism ensures consistent handling of currency representations within the application.