From mdeane@ANSI.org Tue Sep 18 20:43:15 2001 Received: from email1.ansi.org (mail.ansi.org [165.254.114.6] (may be forged)) by dkuug.dk (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id UAA73551 for ; Tue, 18 Sep 2001 20:43:14 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from mdeane@ANSI.org) Received: by email1.ansi.org with Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) id ; Tue, 18 Sep 2001 14:43:26 -0400 Message-ID: <2F81C8110D55D411882A0020356797B20110AA5A@email1.ansi.org> From: Matthew Deane To: "'SC 22 Distribution List'" Subject: SC 22 N 3313 - JTC 1/SC 22/WG 4 Business Plan and Convenor's Repo rt Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 14:43:16 -0400 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 Programming languages, their environments and system software interfaces Secretariat: U.S.A. (ANSI) ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 N3313 TITLE: JTC 1/SC 22/WG 4 Business Plan and Convenor's Report DATE ASSIGNED: 2001-09-18 SOURCE: SC 22/WG 4 Convenor (A. Bennett) BACKWARD POINTER: N/A DOCUMENT TYPE: Other document (Open) PROJECT NUMBER: N/A STATUS: This document will be reviewed at the upcoming SC 22 Plenary under Agenda Item 8.2 pending the approval of its addition to the agenda. ACTION IDENTIFIER: FYI DUE DATE: DISTRIBUTION: Text CROSS REFERENCE: DISTRIBUTION FORM: Open Address reply to: ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 Secretariat Matt Deane ANSI 25 West 43rd Street New York, NY 10036 Telephone: (212) 642-4992 Fax: (212) 840-2298 Email: mdeane@ansi.org _______end of cover page, beginning of report____________ Business Plan and Convener's Report JTC1/SC22/WG4 - Programming Language COBOL September 12, 2001 Period Covered: September 2000 - September 2001 Submitted by: Ann Bennett Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG 4 IBM M49/F34 P.O. Box 49023 San Jose, CA 95161-9023 Email: nwallace@us.ibm.com 1. Management Summary 1.1 JTC1/SC22/WG4 Statement of Scope Development and maintenance of ISO/IEC standards related to programming language COBOL. 1.2 Project Report 1.2.1 Completed Projects None in this period. 1.2.2 Projects Underway 22.01.07 Revision of ISO 1989:1985 -- The revision of ISO 1989:1985 provides major new features, including: cultural adaptability, large character set support, object orientation, condition handling, new data-types (bit, floating point, native binary), portable arithmetic, conditional compilation, user-defined functions, file sharing/record locking, and improved interoperability with other programming languages. The revision provides continued character handling support for the diverse coded character sets traditionally used, and still heavily used, for COBOL data. The FCD ballot closed in May 2001. The summary of voting is contained in N3239; late comments from Sweden are contained in N3234. WG4 meets in November 2001 for FCD ballot resolution. The ITTF has granted a 12-month response time. 22.01.07.01 Object finalization for programming language COBOL (Type 2 TR) The project editor is preparing a first working draft. 1.2.3 Cancelled Projects None 1.3 Cooperation and Competition WG4 cooperates closely with NCITS COBOL Technical Committee J4, to whom SC22 has delegated the technical development and maintenance of COBOL. WG4 has liaisons with the following groups: SC22/WG20 - Ann Bennett SC22/WG11 - Don Nelson 2. Period Review 2.1 Market Requirements COBOL continues to be widely used for development and for enhancement and re-engineering of existing applications. Many factors drive the market for COBOL standardization: 1.Technology advances and the resulting spread of computers to end users makes it mandatory that computer systems adapt to the languages of users. This gives rise to a need in COBOL for support of large character sets and cultural adaptibility. The COBOL FCD includes substantial support for large character sets and cultural adaptability. 2.The trend in the industry is to web-enable COBOL applications, with COBOL running on a server interacting with a non-COBOL user interface. This gives rise to the need for enhanced interoperability with other programming languages and system services. A variety of new datatypes, user-defined functions, and call enhancements are provided in the FCD to support interoperability. 3.Market pressure for new technology led COBOL vendors to cooperate on object-oriented design through the standardization process. Early implementations of the object-oriented features in the FCD are now available and users are designing them into new applications. 4.Deployment of applications across workstations and distributed environments and the growth of COBOL in Unix environments generated requirements for new features in the language. These needs were met by implementor extensions to the language, in different ways by different implementors, leading to a need for post-implementation standardization. Many of these extensions are included in the FCD. 5.Growth of COBOL in the Unix market led X/Open (now Open Group) to develop a Common Application Environment (CAE) providing a portable definition of features essential in a Unix environment, but lacking in standard COBOL. The need for portability between Unix (TM) and non-Unix platforms led to inclusion of some of these features in the revision. The revision of ISO/IEC 1989:1985 addresses many of the market requirements for COBOL, but not all of them. Continued evolution of the international standard for COBOL is essential to provide the benefits of new technolgies and new environments to COBOL users worldwide. An emerging requirement is interaction of COBOL with Java in a web environment. 2.2 Achievements The revision document was progressed to FCD. The ballot closed with one negative vote (from Sweden). 2.3 Resources WG4 meets as needed, usually once a year, and works by electronic correspondence between meetings. Five countries are participating in meetings: Germany, Japan, The Netherlands, the UK, and the USA. Detailed technical development is delegated to NCITS J4. J4 has 11 voting members and 6 observer members. 3. Focus Next Work Period WG4 will focus on completing the response to FCD comments and forwarding a revised document for FDIS, as well as preparing a PDTR for object finalization. WG4 expects that defect handling will be necessary when the revision of ISO/IEC 1989:1985 becomes available. WG4 will soon begin evaluating the requirements for an object-oriented COBOL class library. 3.1 Deliverables WG4 expects to forward a document for FDIS by May 2002 or sooner. 3.2 Strategies 3.2.1 Risks 3.2.2 Opportunities 3.3 Work Program Priorities WG4's highest priority is responding to FCD comments on the revision of ISO/IEC 1989:1985 and preparation of the FDIS (project 22.01.07). Other work is roughly prioritized as follows: preparation of a PDTR for an object finalization feature (project 22.01.07.01) processing of defect reports upon availability of the resvision of ISO 1989 evaluation of the requirements for an object-oriented class library 4. Other Items This section includes items that are part of the Converner's report, but not part of the Business Plan. 4.1 Action Requests at the 2001 Plenary No requests for immediate action. However, the WG4 convener would like to bring to SC22's attention the possibility that requirements for character handling in programming languages need to be re-evaluated with respect to the various forms of ISO/IEC 10646. Currently, WG4 is operating under previous SC22 direction that characters in ISO/IEC 10646 be processed at the code element level, rather than the "text element" or "logical character" level, until industry develops the technology for logical character processing of ISO/IEC 10646. Comments accompanying the negative vote from Sweden on FCD 1989 suggest a need to take the next step in character handling; this is perhaps best highlighted by the Swedish comment on COBOL's national character datatype: "Instead have a (new) datatype specifically for Unicode (recommended encoding form: UTF-16)." Before WG4 launches design of a new datatype specifically for Unicode, the WG4 convener requests that SC22 undertake evaluation of the requirements and the possible approaches that might be taken in programming languages, especially with respect to handling of composite sequences and surrogate pairs. The timing of any such evaluation depends on the urgency perceived within SC22; the WG4 convener does not make any specific request with respect to timing. 4.2 Schedule The schedule for project 22.01.07 is as follows: DIS start: June 2002 Forward IS to ITTF: December 2002 The schedule for project 22.01.07.01 is as follows: Combined registration and PDTR ballot: July 2002 DTR (allowing for 2 PDTR ballots): January 2004 TR to ITTF: June 2004 4.3 WG4 Meetings 4.3.1 Recent Meetings May 2000, Newbury, UK (co-located with an NCITS J4 meeting) 4.3.2 Future Meetings November 5-8, 2001 (co-located with an NCITS J4 meeting) __________ end of document _____________________