gnubol: STD - from the San Diego J4 meeting

["William M. Klein" <wmklein@ix.netcom.com>]

Two items were "resolved" at the J4 San Diego meeting.  These items are now
placed in the "controversial" category of our future agenda, because there is
(at least some) question about whether these "decisions" will stick once WG4
(the ISO-ish COBOL group) see them.   I thought that I would report them both
here (comp.lang.cobol and gnu-list) - these are both items that if you have
"strong" feelings that the group went the wrong way, you should QUICKLY
contact your "national body" and let them know (probably CC'ing the J4
chair). (Let me know by private email if you need to find out how to contact
your national body.)

1) (Possibly not real controversial)
  The "ATTRIBUTE" phrase has been entirely removed from the enhanced
Report-Writer facility.  This was the phrase that allowed an entire report to
be printed in a "proportional font" - but didn't really allow for changing -
within the same report - from fixed to proportional or vice versa (line by
line - much less field by field).  It also didn't handle "decimal point
alignment" in proportional fonts - or the ability to specify other types of
"styles" (bold, underline, color, etc).  The feeling at J4 was that it had
enough problems with sufficiently limited capability that "dropping" it now
(with the possibility of adding an extended feature in a future revision)
would be better than trying to spend the time "fixing" it in this revision.

2) The "finalizer" auto-method is being dropped from this revision (where OO
is added) and being "postponed" to the upcoming "technical report" when a
Standard Class Library will be defined.
  Almost every problem with the current specification that the committee
talked about ended up being a lengthy one - without certainty that the
committee really knew what SHOULD happen.  A lot of the underlying problem is
that this facility is "by definition" an asynchronous event - and COBOL is
(traditionally) totally "synchronous" (even in OO).  Therefore (for example)
J4 couldn't really figure out what to do if a FINALIZER included a "STOP RUN"
statement that might occur in the middle of any statement that might still be
going on in the "mainline" logic.   It was also felt (by some) that where the
entire timing of FINALIZER and all rules related to "garbage collection" were
STILL being left to the implementor (even if the auto-method were added),
that it really wouldn't have added a lot to the portability of programs.
There was also discussion of whether programmers could explicitly invoke this
auto-method and once it was decided (I was out of the room for this
discussion) that they could NOT, this also added to this being a "limited"
facility that would have taken too much time to fix before the Standard is
finished.

   ***

The bottom-line from the meeting is that there really is a lot of hope that
the revision will go out as a "final committee draft" for review during this
upcoming summer - and will actually become "official" at the end of next
year.  (I am not certain that I share this as a belief, but do certainly
sense that J4 is doing what they can now to try and make it happen.)

--
Bill Klein
    wmklein <at> ix dot netcom dot com



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