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4. Defining Data Part 1
4.1 Number Formats
A large portion of any COBOL program consists of the data division and how the data is defined and
manipulated. As already described in the previous section (The Four Divisions),
each identifier used in the procedure division must be defined. How they are defined depends of what is
to be performed on that data.
More on data definition for tables (arrays), Boolean data, and for writing printing data, is discussed in
the following section (Defining Data Part 2).
The MOVE verb is used extensively in COBOL to manipulate data and so is introduced here. As the name suggests, MOVE simply
tells the computer to place a certain item of data to a specified identifier. a typical statement would be of the form: 
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