There are no special line continuation rules for EQUEL/COBOL. You can break an EQUEL statement between words and continue it on any number of subsequent lines. An exception to this rule is that you cannot continue a statement between two words that are reserved when they appear together, such as declare cursor. For a list of double keywords, see the QUEL Reference Guide. Start each continuation line with the ## characters. You can use blank lines between continuation lines.

If you want to continue a character-string constant across two lines, end the first line with a backslash character (\) and continue the string at the beginning of the next line, in the area which is sometimes used for sequence numbers of COBOL statements. In this case, do not place the ## characters at the beginning of the continuation lines.

For examples of string continuation, see String Literals.