in070750
J4/07-0096
Annual Report for: INCITS/J4
Covering the Period from June 2006 to May 2007
Title of INCITS Subgroup: Programming Language COBOL
Links:
Informal Description of Work:
Development and maintenance of the ISO and ANSI COBOL standards
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 JTC1 ballot for approval of DTR 24716, Native COBOL Syntax for XML Support, closed April 6, 2007. The tally was 10 – Abstain, 9 – Approve as presented, 3 - Disapprove, 1 ‑ Approve with comments. The 3 countries that voted to disapprove all submitted the same comments and indicated they would change to approve if those comments were accepted. SC22/WG4 will be addressing the comments at a meeting in June 2007.
The JTC1 ballot for approval of DTR 24717, Collection Classes, will close June 20, 2007.
A working draft for the revision of ISO/IEC 1989:2002, Programming language COBOL, was circulated for a SC22/WG4 HoD straw poll in July 2005. There was substantial agreement on its content. J4 has made the requested changes and incorporated the Finalizer and XML technical reports into the working draft. The WG4 convenor is planning to submit the CD for registration and approval in December 2007.
Fifty-five requests for interpretation of the 2002 COBOL
standard have been received and are being processed by J4 and WG4. Two Technical Corrigenda were approved by JTC1 and adopted
by ANSI. A third Technical Corrigenda has been approved
by WG4 and will soon be submitted to SC22 for ballot.
Voting membership decreased from six to five during this reporting period, due to the purchase of one member by another. All five members are actively contributing to the work of the committee.
Two technical reports, DTR 24716 - Native COBOL Syntax for XML Support and DTR 24717 - COBOL collection classes, were submitted to JTC1 for approval this year. 24716 was approved. The ballot period for 24717 has not ended.
The working draft for a revision of ISO/IEC 1989:2002 was reviewed by WG4 during the previous reporting period. Comments were resolved and actioned by J4. The Finalizer and XML technical reports were incorporated into the working draft. This revision is slated to 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
Technical Corrigendum 1 and Technical Corrigendum 2 for the 2002 COBOL standard have been published by ISO/IEC JTC1 and adopted by ANSI. Technical Corrigendum 3 has been approved by WG4 and is ready for approval by SC22.
As committee membership decreases, it is a challenge to keep up with the workload. All voting members actively contribute to the work of the committee in order to reach our goals. This is an ongoing challenge as other activities demand attention from our members.
The major challenges to be addressed this next year are:
J4 and WG4 will address the comments from the JTC1 ballot on DTR 24717, Collection Classes.
J4 and WG4 will complete the updates resulting from the comments on the WG4 straw poll on the working draft for a revision of ISO/IEC 1989:2002 and include the Collection Class technical report. The first CD will be submitted for registration and approval.
J4 will process defect reports on the 2002 COBOL standard.
|
Meeting Number |
Date |
Location |
|
257 |
July 31 - Aug 3, 2006 |
|
|
258 |
|
|
|
259 |
December 4-8, 2006 |
|
|
260 |
February 12-15, 2006 |
|
|
261 |
April 16-20, 2007 |
|
|
Meeting Number |
Date |
Location |
|
|
WG4 meeting 27 |
June 19-22, 2007 |
United Kindgom |
|
|
262 |
August 6-10, 2007 |
|
|
|
263 |
October 22-26, 2007 |
|
|
|
264 |
December 3-7, 2007 |
|
|
|
2008 meetings yet to |
be scheduled |
|
|
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.
|
Position (and training date) |
Name and organization represented |
|
Chair (December 2003) |
Don Schricker, Micro Focus |
|
Vice Chair (December 2005) |
Robert Karlin, Karlins' Korner |
|
Secretary |
Charles Stevens, Karlins' Korner |
|
International Representative (December 2004) |
Barry Tauber, Victor Consulting |
|
Vocabulary Representative |
none |
|
Treasurer |
Bruce Hobbs, Victor Consulting |
|
Project Editors |
Object Finalization TR: Wataru Takagi, ITSCJ Defect remediation: Ann Bennett, IBM XML TR: Don Schricker, Micro Focus Collection Class TR: Robert Karlin, Karlins' Korner Revision: Don Nelson, on retainer |
|
WG4 Convenor |
|
|
Archivist – Paper |
Barry Tauber, Victor Consulting |
|
Archivist – Electronic |
Robert Karlin, Karlins' Korner |
J4 presently has 5 voting
members and no advisory members. The voting members
are: IBM; ITSCJ; Karlins' Korner;
Micro Focus, and Victor Consulting.
Changes since last year:
Voting membership went
from 6 to 5 when Micro Focus purchased Acucorp.
COBOL continues to be widely used for development of new applications, 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.
a. J4 internal procedures
The J4 internal procedures approved during this reporting period can be found at http://www.cobolstandard.info/j4/files/06-0089.doc. At the request of one of the J4 members, J4/06-0089 has already been reviewed and approved by the Procedures board.
b. The financial statement for this reporting period is:
This report covers
J4 meetings 257 - 261 (June 2006 – May 2007).
Note that there
are 2 separate funds maintained and described below.
1) J4
|
Beginning
Balance |
$ 3858.97 |
|
Receipts |
$ 4400.00 |
|
Total |
$ 8258.97 |
|
Receivables
Outstanding |
$ 0.00 |
|
Total Disbursements |
$ 5471.76 |
|
Debts outstanding |
$ 0.00 |
|
Current
Balance |
$ 2787.21 |
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 |
$ 3296.65 |
|
Receipts |
$ 0.00 |
|
Total |
$ 3296.65 |
|
Receivables
Outstanding |
$ 0.00 |
|
Total Disbursements |
$ 1164.00 |
|
Debts outstanding |
$ 0.00 |
|
Current
Balance |
$ 2132.65
($2057.65 is held by INCITS and $75.00 is held by J4) |