COBOL - Projects

22.01.07 Revision of ISO 1989:1985

WG4 is developing a major revision of the COBOL standard. A draft is nearly ready for progression to Final CD ballot.

Major Features:

• Support for large character sets, such as ISO/IEC 10646
• Cultural adaptability, often called Internationalization
• Support for object-oriented programming
• Exception handling
• Conditional compilation
• New data types: bit, pointer, floating point, native binary
• A portable mode of arithmetic
• User-defined functions
• Enhanced interoperability with other programming languages
• File sharing and record locking
• Enhanced report writer
• Data validation

Milestones

              Stage      Description                 Date
              3.1        Initiate final CD ballot    2/2000
              4.1        Initiate DIS                5/2002
              5.0        Final text to ISO           11/2002

Technical proposals and the latest draft standard for this project can be found on the J4 web site .

Technical Reports

1. Pending JTC 1 approval, WG4 will produce a technical report specifying features for object finalization in COBOL. The detailed specification will be developed by NCITS Technical Committee J4 in the USA. Further information can be found on the J4 Finalizer TR web site.
   
2. WG4 intends to develop a techical report for a class library for object-oriented programming, but the project has not yet been initiated.

Defect Reports

There are currently no Defect Reports open in WG4.