IN/05-0367

J4/05-0117

 

Annual Report for: INCITS/J4

Covering the Period from August 2004 to May 2005

Title of INCITS Subgroup: Programming Language COBOL

Links:


Informal Description of Work:

 

                        Development and maintenance of the ISO and ANSI COBOL standards

1. Executive Summary

An ISO COBOL standard was approved in September 2002 that was developed under national terms of reference. This ISO standard was adopted by ANSI in 2003.

TR 19755, Object Finalization for Programming Language COBOL, has been published.

The SC22 ballot for registration and approval of pDTR 24716, Native COBOL Syntax for XML Support, closed 28 May 2005.   The document was submitted for ballot 5 months later than scheduled (February 2005 instead of September 2004) because more changes were made to the original design of the facility than had been anticipated.  The scheduled approval date is August 2006.

The SC22 ballot for registration and approval of pDTR 24717, COBOL collection classes, closed 28 May 2005.  The document was submitted for ballot 5 months later than scheduled (February 2005 instead of September 2004) because it took longer to complete the design of the facility than had been anticipated, which was due in part to other demands on the project editor.  The scheduled approval date is August 2006.

The working draft for the revision of ISO/IEC 1989:2002, Programming language COBOL, will be circulated for a WG4 HoD straw poll after the June 2005 J4 meeting.  A subdivision of the work item to authorize this revision will be submitted to SC22 during the next review period.  The target publication date is 2008.

Forty-seven requests for interpretation of the 2002 COBOL standard have been received and are being processed by J4 and WG4. During this reporting period, two Technical Corrigenda were submitted to SC22 for ballot.

Voting membership increased from six to seven during this reporting period. All members are actively contributing to the work of the committee.

2. Significant Accomplishments

Two technical reports, pDTR 24716 - Native COBOL Syntax for XML Support and pDTR 24717 - COBOL collection classes, were submitted for ballots for registration and approval which close 28 May 2005.  The documents were submitted for ballot 5 months later than scheduled.  The delay was due in part to the fact that more changes were made to the early designs than anticipated and by conflicting demands on the time of one of the project editors.  It is hoped that the scheduled publication date of 2006 can be met.

It is expected that by the time this report is presented, WG4 will be reviewing the working draft for a revision of ISO/IEC 1989:2002.  SC22 will be requested to subdivide the work item in order to revise this standard.  Final approval of this revision is anticipated for 2008.  This revision will include:

·          Dynamic-capacity tables

·          Function pointers

·          Any-length elementary items

·          Increased size limit on non-numeric literals

·          Locale parameter on upper and lower case functions

·          Structured constants

·          Increased minimum maxima for record locks

·          Functions for formatting dates

·          XML TR

·          Collection Class TR

·          Finalizer TR, if feedback is positive

Technical Corrigendum 1 and Technical Corrigendum 2 for the 2002 COBOL standard have been balloted by SC22.  Comments will be resolved so that these documents can be published.

3. Significant Challenges

It was a challenge to accomplish all of the above items with only 3 face-to-face meetings and 6 Voting members.  We did this by having 8 half-day teleconference/webmeetings on focused topics.  All voting members actively contributed to the work of the committee in order to accomplish these tasks.

PDTR 24716, Native COBOL Syntax for XML Support, was submitted for ballot 5 months later than scheduled because more changes were made to the original design of the facility than had been anticipated.

PDTR 24717, COBOL collection classes, was submitted for ballot 5 months later than scheduled because it took longer to complete the design of the facility than had been anticipated, which was due in part to other demands on the project editor.

These two TRs are scheduled for publication in August 2006.  Meeting this date is dependent on the magnitude of comments received on ballots.

4. Expected Challenges

The major challenges to be addressed this next year are:

·        J4 and WG4 will address the comments on the SC22 ballots on TC1, TC2, pDTR 24716 and pDTR 24717 and send these documents for further processing.

·        J4 and WG4 will address the comments on the WG4 straw poll on the working draft for a revision of ISO/IEC 1989:2002.

·        J4 will process defect reports on the 2002 COBOL standard.

5. Committee Activities

a. Previous Year's Meetings:

Meeting Number

Date

Location

248a

August 31, 2004

teleconference and web meeting

248b

September 2, 2004

teleconference and web meeting

248c

September 13, 2004

teleconference and web meeting

248d

September 14, 2004

teleconference and web meeting

248e

October 6, 2004

teleconference and web meeting

248f

October 7, 2004

teleconference and web meeting

WG4 mtg 25

October 18-21, 2004

The Hague, The Netherlands

249

December 6-11, 2004

Campbell, California

249a

January 13, 2005

teleconference and web meeting

250

February 7-11, 2005

Ontario, California

251

April 4-8, 2005

Carmel, California

251a

May 18, 2005

teleconference and web meeting





b. Next Year's Planned Meetings:

Meeting Number

Date

Location

252

June 13-17, 2005

Lincolnshire, Illinois

253

August 22-26, 2005

Portland, Oregon

WG4 meeting 26

October 17-21, 2005

Las Vegas, Nevada

254

December 5-9, 2005

Garden Grove, California

255

Feb 27 - March 3, 2006

Ontario, California

256

May 15-19, 2006

Northern California

257

July 31 - Aug 4, 2006

west coast

258

October 16-20, 2006

Lincolnshire, Illinois

6. Liaison Activities

The active liaison this year was SC22/WG4.

ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG4 COBOL

WG4 has responsibility for the ISO COBOL standard. J4 develops this standard under national terms of reference. J4 members are also members of WG4. WG4 and J4 have synchronized their schedules.

ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG20 Internationalization

Since the creation of WG20, J4 has had liaison in order to incorporate their work into COBOL standards. WG20 was abolished by SC22 during this reporting period.

Interex SIGCOBOL

Representatives from Interex SIGCOBOL, who are COBOL users, have attended many J4 meetings and given their input on how new features of the language would be used, which has been invaluable in shaping the language. The Interix SIGCOBOL group was abolished during this reporting period.

7. Membership and Officers

a. Officers:

 

Position (and training date)

Name and organization represented

Chair (December 2003)

Don Schricker, Micro Focus Inc.

Vice Chair

 none

Secretary

 Charles Stevens, Unisys

International Representative (December 2002)

 Barry Tauber, Victor Consulting

Vocabulary Representative

 none

Treasurer

Jeff Lanam, HP

Project Editors

Object Finalization TR:  Wataru Takagi, ITSCJ

Defect remediation:  Ann Bennett, IBM

XML TR:  Don Schricker

Collection Class TR:  Bob Karlin, Karlin's Korner

Revision:  Don Nelson, on retainer

WG4 Convenor

Don Schricker, Micro Focus

Charles Stevens, Unisys, will be taking over during the next reporting period

Archivist – Paper

Barry Tauber, Victor Consulting

Archivist – Electronic

Bob Karlin, Karlins' Korner
b. Membership:

J4 presently has 7 voting members and 1 advisory member.  The voting members are:  Hewlett-Packard Company; IBM Corporation; ITSCJ; Karlins' Korner;  Micro Focus, Inc.; Unisys Corporation; and Victor Consulting.

Changes since last year:

            Voting membership went from 6 to 7 when ITSCJ regained voting rights.

8. Future Trends and Related Technical Activities

COBOL continues to be widely used for development, and for enhancement and re-engineering of existing applications.  The trend in the industry is to web-enable COBOL applications, with COBOL running on a server interacting with a non-COBOL user interface.

The following facts give you an idea of the importance of COBOL:

·        More than $1.5 trillion has been invested in COBOL applications

·        More than 30 billion COBOL transactions occur daily

·        More than 200 billion lines of COBOL code are working as you read this

·        More than 5 billion lines of COBOL are written every year

·        75% of the world's business data is in COBOL.

Continued evolution of the international standard for COBOL is essential to provide the benefits of new technologies and new environments to COBOL users worldwide.

9. Other Administrative Information

a.  J4 internal procedures

No changes were made to the J4 internal procedures during this reporting period.

b.  The financial statement for this reporting period is:

This report covers J4 meetings 249 - 251 (August 2004 – May 2005).

Note that there are 2 separate funds maintained and described below.

1) J4

Beginning Balance 

$  6284.00

Receipts 

$  3400.00

Total 

$  9684.00

Receivables Outstanding 

$        0.00

Total Disbursements 

$  2509.48

Debts outstanding 

$        0.00

Current Balance 

$  7174.52

2) J4 Technical Editor's Fund

This fund pays for that portion of our project editor work that has been subcontracted out under committee direction. The funding was raised by voluntary contributions from member companies and other interested parties.
 

Beginning Balance 

$ 4905.65

Receipts 

$ 0.00

Total 

$ 4905.65

Receivables Outstanding 

$ 0.00

Total Disbursements 

$ 1539.00

Debts outstanding 

$ 0.00

Current Balance 

$ 3366.65 ($3291.65 is held by INCITS and $75.00 is held by J4)