HP 3000 Manuals

COBOL/HP-UX Language Reference for the Series 700 and 800

Source Programs 

(VSC2) (MF)

DBCS characters can be used in literals (since literals are data), in
comments and comment-entries, and in user-defined words.  Otherwise the
DBCS directive does not change the range of characters that can be used
in source programs - the program is still written using the COBOL
character set (see the chapter COBOL Concepts).

MPE/iX 5.0 Documentation