Annual Report for: TC J1 (PL/I)
Covering the Period from April 2004 to June 2005
Title of INCITS Subgroup:
Links:
Informal Description of Work:
J1 has development and maintenance responsibility for standards and technical reports related to the PL/I Programming Language. J1 also has informal responsibilities to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22 with regard to projects 22.05 and 22.06: those projects are not assigned to a WG within SC22, so there is no formal TAG.
J1 has development and maintenance responsibility for standards and technical reports related to the PL/I Programming Language. Since the relevant documents have been published, and all of the committee's projects are in maintenance status, J1 went into maintenance/correspondence status several years ago, and has remained in that status. There has been no significant activity or events in the last several years. As a result of this, a recommendation was made to INCITS in 2004 to place the technical committee's work into stabilized status. INCITS participants are invited to note the similarities in content between this report and every J1 annual report for the last decade or more; the make-work involved in the reporting process at this point is not consistent with avowed INCITS goals and operating procedures.
Within the last year and indeed within the last decade and more, J1 has had no request for clarifications or changes to the two standards. There have been no new publications. INCITS 53 (published as X3.53) and INCITS (published as X3.74) were reaffirmed in 2003 and should continue to be reaffirmed as needed within INCITS, Similarly, the corresponding international standards ISO 6160 and ISO 6522 continue to be reaffirmed as needed within ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22.
The 2004 annual report reviews important J1 accomplishments since X3.53 was published 30 years ago, including a record-setting history of minimal clarification requests and errata for either standard.
. J1 has had great success in having produced documents that do not generate clarification requests and its policy of resisting changes to the language definition of features just because they have been successful (or gained publicity) in other languages (see elsewhere in this report). One of the consequences of this approach has been almost no activity --even by the standards of maintenance TCs-- in more than a decade. Not surprisingly, and as noted in the 2003 report, this has had one bad consequence -- it is difficult to get people to respond to letter ballots, and even to electronic mail, when there is nothing really happening other than procedural rituals. This has been especially true in J1's case since the TC long ago agreed on standing policies about reaffirmation (also discussed elsewhere in this report and in many earlier reports) and remains true even though I am confident that TC members would pay careful attention if a substantive issue actually arose. INCITS was asked in 2004 to approve "stablized" status for the committee's work because the likelihood of achieving a clear letter ballot under these circumstances is low. We urge INCITS to continue to pursue permission to implement such a status with ANSI, pointing out that the alternative is make-work and perhaps an even lower quality of review should some issue emerge.
Other than trying to keep TC members, many of whom have had no direct involvement with PL/I development in a number of years, awake and responsive from year to year in an environment with substantially no activity, no significant challenges are expected in the future. The current J1 membership is willing to be available to INCITS should the need arise.
Due to the committee's lack of an active program, liaisons to J1, other than to CT22 and INCITS itself are inactive and will be reactivated only if needed. The J1 Chair also acts as SC22 Project Editor for PL/I and provides liaison in that capacity.
We do not need a separate list of the members, but we do need to know if there are any trends in membership or other membership issues that would affect the ability of the TC to meet its workload. The list of officers(both elected and appointed) gives some indication of who the key people are and how long they have served.
See discussion under
· "Significant challenges", above.
|
Position (and training date) |
Name and organization represented |
|
Chair |
John C Klensin,
Ph.D. |
|
Vice Chair |
Mr. Charles Nylander (see "Membership" below)) |
|
International Representative |
John C Klensin, acting |
The list as received from the Secretariat, and attached, appears to be correct.
None of the present members of J1 are formally acting for the organizations that employ them; all are acting as individual experts and voluntarily contributing time to the committee as needed.
There have been no changes in membership in the last several years, although fewer and fewer members are spending any time paying attention to J1 issues.
All current projects are in maintenance status. The TC anticipates no further changes to these standards although it continues to recommend that the Standards be reaffirmed until the language is no longer in use. The TC agreed in 2004 that shifting its work to what was then called stabilized status would be appropriate and, indeed, was more consistent with an early J1 recommendation that was one of the contributors to the earlier "maintenance committee" status than the "maintenance" model was. As discussed above, J1 urges INCITS to continue to pursue a model that reflects standards that are completely stable, should be reaffirmed as long as they are in use, but that are supported by TCs that exist purely on standby should clarification requests arise.
It is, by now, fairly clear that there is insufficient requirement,
and
insufficient resources, to justify the development of additional,
extended, or
revised PL/I standards. If such work were undertaken, J1 would
recommend that
the real-time area would be an appropriate one for a functional
Standard with
language bindings, rather than a language-specific activity. If such a
functional standard is started, J1 recommends its technical report as
part of
the
J1 has repeatedly suggested in other contexts that programming language standards should be issued, revised once, and thereafter either reaffirmed or withdrawn. Under that recommendation, a revision should occur only if it is needed to clarify significant issues and should be limited to those clarifications. This suggestion is based on the conviction that further development within the context of the existing and established language is rarely either economically justified or a service to the broad user community of that language, regardless of the interests of membership of the TC. J1 has concluded from this that developments in programming language standards beyond a single revision should either be handled as strict extension standards (including language bindings to a functional standard) or considered as new language standard proposals. The latter might be initiated as "closely related to" or "deriving from" an existing earlier language standard, but obligated to justify themselves independently on the basis of economics, resources, and demand. We note with interest that this approach seems to be consistent with recent "business model justification" trends in INCTIS and JTC1 and strongly recommend continuation of that policy --certainly with respect to PL/I-related standards-- as this work is moved toward some form of stabilized status.
J1 does not collect or manage funds. All expenses in the last several years (primarily email and maintenance of online mailing lists) have been covered by the Chair from other resources and contributed to the TCs efforts. The actual dollar value of those expenses is considered to be trivial.