An ordinal represents a set of ordered values. The DEFINE ORDINAL statement assigns a name to set of ordered values. The name is the ordinal you use to reference the set. For example, if you were to use DEFINE ORDINAL to define an ordinal named months, it could include members such as jan feb mar, and so on. You could then reference the member names as defined in the months ordinal rather than referencing them using their associated fixed binary values. Advantages to using ordinals over fixed binary values include improved self-documentation of the code, and increased program reliability as variables declared with the ordinal type can only be assigned and compared with ordinals and members of the same type.