From rinehuls@access.digex.net Mon Aug 5 22:51:53 1996 Received: from access2.digex.net (qlrhmEbBUV1EY@access2.digex.net [205.197.245.193]) by dkuug.dk (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id WAA15244 for ; Mon, 5 Aug 1996 22:51:49 +0200 Received: from localhost (rinehuls@localhost) by access2.digex.net (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id QAA01692 ; for ; Mon, 5 Aug 1996 16:51:46 -0400 Date: Mon, 5 Aug 1996 16:51:46 -0400 (EDT) From: "william c. rinehuls" X-Sender: rinehuls@access2.digex.net To: sc22docs@dkuug.dk Subject: document SC22 N2227 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 Programming languages, their environments and system software interfaces Secretariat: U.S.A. (ANSI) ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 N2227 August 1996 TITLE: WG4 Convener's Report for the September 1996 JTC 1/SC22 Plenary SOURCE: Secretariat, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 WORK ITEM: N/A STATUS: N/A CROSS REFERENCE: N/A DOCUMENT TYPE: Convener's Report ACTION: To SC22 Member Bodies for information or action, as applicable. THIS CONVENER'S REPORT AND THE ISSUES NOTED THEREIN WILL BE AGENDA ITEMS FOR THE SEPTEMBER 1996 JTC 1/SC22 PLENARY Address reply to: ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 Secretariat William C. Rinehuls 8457 Rushing Creek Court Springfield, VA 22153 USA Tel: +1 (703) 912-9680 Fax: +1 (703) 912-2973 email: rinehuls@access.digex.net ___________________________________________________________________________ ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22/WG4 N 094 Subject: WG4 Convener's Report to JTC 1/SC22 Date: August 2, 1996 From: Ann Wallace, SC22/WG4 Convener Work Scope. WG4 has the following projects: 1. Project 22.01.07 for the Revision of ISO 1989, Programming language COBOL, as an ASC X3 "I" project with development by X3J4. 2. Defect handling in accordance with the Synchronization Plan for activities of WG4 and ASC X3 Technical Committee X3J4. Meetings. WG4 has met once since the last SC22 Plenary: May 20-24, 1996 Zaandam, The Netherlands The following meetings are planned: March 17-21, 1997 California, USA (city to be confirmed) The following countries participate in meetings: Canada, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands, the UK, and the US. France participates in correspondence but has been unable to send anyone to the last two meetings. The continued participation of France is in doubt. Issues. Project 22.01.07 is on the list of projects not reaching CD stage within three years of NP approval. WG4 recommends retention of the project, and has just forwarded a document to the secretariat for combined CD registration and CD ballot. Project Status -- 22.01.07: Revision of ISO 1989. Development of this revision began in mid-1992 with the proposal of a small and quick revision to complete in mid-1997. Over time, the scope of the project has grown in response to industry emphasis on object-oriented technology and to input received on the informal working draft review. The major enhancements to COBOL now include - internationalization - file sharing and record locking capability - type declarations - enhanced interlanguage call - enhanced detection and reporting of exceptions - a datatype for bit handling and boolean operations - floating point data types - a national character datatype for multiple-octet coded character sets - typed and untyped pointers and the capability to acquire and free storage - extended letters in identifiers - increased portability of arithmetic - free-form source text - compiler directives for portable specification of processing options - automatically-expanded tables - an enhanced report writer - a data validation facility - a screen i-o facility, based on the XPG4 screen facility The internationalization support has a dependency on POSIX for locale specifications and on the work of WG20 for monetary formats in locales. Extended identifiers are supported with an implementation dependency for case mapping. While the source code will be non-portable, users will have the capability to express identifiers in their own language when portability is not important. The implementation dependency results from the lack of a specification of attributes of characters from WG20 because the work item was not approved. Based on experience in responding to comments for the informal review, the schedule is revised to allow more time for modifying the document and responding to comments. The following are revised target dates: Old Date New Date Stage Description 08/96 08/96 3.1 Initiate combined CD registration and CD ballot 05/97 11/97 4.1 Initiate 4-month DIS ballot 12/97 08/98 5.0 IS The document for combined CD registration/CD ballot was forwarded to the SC22 secretariat on August 2, 1996. Synchronization plan. No changes are required to the synchronization plan. Document editing. Difficulties continue with the word processor used to produce the draft (WordPerfect). It still takes a week to generate and print the document by trial and error combinations of files. Indexing and automatic cross-referencing are not usable. While this slows the work, the effort to convert to another word processor is perceived as a big hurdle that would substantially delay the standard, and no-one is certain which word processor would be completely successful. No action is planned during the current revision. Web page. The WG4 web page has not yet been established; this is a matter of time. Liaisons. WG4 has liaisons with the following SC22 working groups: - WG9 - Donald Nelson - WG11 - Donald Nelson - WG20 - Ann Wallace Michel Dessier of France participates in WG4 as Category C Liaison from the X/Open COBOL working group. Defect Handling. WG4 has not processed any defect reports in the reporting period. ______ End of Report ___________________________________________________