The Purpose of ‘When Other’ in COBOL EVALUATE

The Evaluate statement reduces code effort of writing multiple-if statements. Here, you’ll find the purpose of ‘WHEN OTHER’ in the EVALUATE statement.

Evaluate Syntax

The syntax for evaluate is:

EVALUATE TRUE
    WHEN  CONDITION
          PERFORM  PARA1
    WHEN OTHER
         continue
END-EVALUATE.

When Other in Evaluate..

Why “when other ” you need to write in evaluate?

the reasons are simple:

This avoids ambiguity to the compiler.
If the conditions are not matched, it helps what action it has to take.
During Numeric or character validations, you may get data, which is not expected. So you need a piece of code in WHEN OTHER to handle these.