I'm analyzing a Cobol program, and I've encountered a few statements like this:
=COPY FOO135
with the = as the first character of the line. IBM's COBOL documentation on the COPY statement does not include an = anywhere in the definition, and I've not been able to find this form of COPY statement anywhere on Google. The statement appears in contexts (like the beginning of the working storage section) that imply it is not an assignment.
What does =COPY FOO234 mean in COBOL?
That's simply not COBOL.
A COPY statement would be ended with a period.
An equal sign outside of a numeric expression is invalid.
If that's parsed in fixed-form reference-format, which is commonly the default, then you have an invalid indicator (position 7) F.
This leaves the implicit question what this is. My guess: it is either a preparsed COBOL source file (the copybooks content comes directly afterwards) or a file that needs a preprocessor (which possibly would read in the copybook itself) before it is passed to the COBOL compiler.