SIGNAL causes an unusual change in the flow of control (if you specify labelname or VALUE expression), or controls the trapping of certain conditions (if you specify ON or OFF).

To control trapping, you specify OFF or ON and the condition you want to trap. OFF turns off the specified condition trap. ON turns on the specified condition trap. All information on condition traps is contained in Chapter 11, Conditions and Condition Traps.

To change the flow of control, a label name is derived from labelname or taken from the character string result of evaluating the expression after VALUE. The labelname you specify must be a literal string or symbol that is taken as a constant. If you specify a symbol for labelname, the search looks for a label with uppercase characters. If you specify a literal string, the search uses the literal string directly. You can locate label names with lowercase letters only if you specify the label as a literal string with the same case. Similarly, for SIGNAL VALUE, the lettercase of labelname must match exactly. You can omit the subkeyword VALUE if expression does not begin with a symbol or literal string, that is, if it starts with a special character, such as an operator character or parenthesis. All active pending DO, IF, SELECT, and INTERPRET instructions in the current routine are then ended and cannot be resumed. Control is then passed to the first label in the program that matches the given name, as though the search had started at the beginning of the program.

The labelname and usercondition are single symbols, which are taken as constants. The trapname is a string or symbol taken as a constant.

If there are duplicates, control is always passed to the first occurrence of the label in the program.

When control reaches the specified label, the line number of the SIGNAL instruction is assigned to the special variable SIGL. This can aid debugging because you can use SIGL to determine the source of a transfer of control to a label.