German version of the June meeting report
At the August, October, and November meetings of J4, the primary focus was the processing of the comments received during the quality review of the draft standard. This review is not a public review, but is being conducted internally by J4 and WG4 in preparation for the next public review. The changes to the COBOL language that were approved at the November meeting are as follows:
a. Dynamic tables were removed.
b. Record locking was simplified. In addition, file and record locks must be recognized within, as well as across, run units.
c. T literals were removed. These mixed national and alphanumeric characters. The implementor may allow this mix in alphanumeric literals.
d. An alphabet-name was added as an optional parameter to the DISPLAY-OF and NATIONAL-OF functions.
e. The CALL-CONVENTION directive will control not only name mapping, but anything the implementor wants it to control.
f. Object data cannot be passed by reference. Should it be allowed as the RETURNING item?
g. The NOT AT END phrase can be specified before the AT END phrase, and similarly for the other phrases with NOT.
h. The FINAL phrase can be specified on the PROPERTY clause.
i. The capability to specify that a class IMPLEMENTS an interface was added.
j. The finalize method was added to the base class. The finalize method will be invoked by the garbage collector.
k. When a function has no arguments, () are optional. This applies to both intrinsic functions and user-defined functions.
l. In the linkage section of a method, you can specify that the formal parameter may have ANY LENGTH for alphanumeric, boolean, and national items.
There have been several public reviews to determine the features in the next standard. In order to get a standard published, only editorial corrections and serious deficiencies will be considered in the future. (No additional features or requests for deletion will be considered.) There will be a 8-10 week review for quality after the changes are made from this quality review. The errors in the draft will be fixed after that review. With a document of high quality the DIS ballot can begin shortly after the FCD ballot closes.
The schedule for the ISO reviews of the draft COBOL standard is shown below. ANSI will have a U.S. public review during each ISO review period. In order for comments to be considered in the formation of the U.S. ballot on an ISO draft, the comments must be received early in the review period. If you would like to receive notification of the public review periods, contact das@microfocus.com
This page is maintained by Don Schricker (das@microfocus.com).
The last update to this page was on 2-December-1998.
