The Shape of Code

Look what arrived in the post this morning, a complementary copy of the new Cobol Standard (the CD on top of a paper copy of the 1985 standard).

In the good old days, before the Internet, members of IST/5 received a complementary copy of every new language standard in comforting dead tree form (a standard does not feel like a standard until it is weighed in the hand; pdfs are so lightweight); these days we get complementary access to pdfs. I suspect that this is not a change of policy at British Standards, but more likely an excessive print run that they need to dispose of to free up some shelf space. But it was nice of them to think of us workers rather than binning the CDs (my only contribution to Cobol 2014 was to agree with whatever the convener of the committee proposed with regard to Cobol).

So what does the new 955-page standard have to say for itself?

“COBOL began as a business programming language, but its present use has spread well beyond that to a general purpose programming language. Significant enhancements in this International Standard include:

— Dynamic-capacity tables

— Dynamic-length elementary items

— Enhanced locale support in functions

— Function pointers

— Increased size limit on alphanumeric, boolean, and national literals

— Parametric polymorphism (also known as method overloading)

— Structured constants

— Support for industry-standard arithmetic rules

— Support for industry-standard date and time formats

— Support for industry-standard floating-point formats

— Support for multiple rounding options”

I guess those working with Cobol will find these useful, but I don’t see them being enough to attract new users from other languages.

I have heard tentative suggestions of the next revision appearing in the 2020s, but with membership of the Cobol committee dying out (literally in some cases and through retirement in others) perhaps this 2014 publication is the definitive final version of Cobol.