Cobol - Re: "in search of" International (not the usual coutnries) OO COBOL

Author

Re: "in search of" International (not the usual coutnries) OO COBOL

James J. Gavan

2007-04-15, 6:55 pm

William M. Klein wrote:
> I know that we have "lurkers" (and some more active participants) in this group
> from a number of counties (other than the "usual" US, UK, Germany, Canada, and
> New Zealand)
>
> If any of you reading this note
>
> A) Live and WORK in any of these countries:
> - Spain
> - France
> - Denmark
> - Australia
> - South Africa
> - Finland
> - Switzerland
> - Singapore
> - Czech Republic
> - Korea, Republic of
> - Belgium
> - (Ireland
> - China
> - Slovenia
> - Norway
> - Italy
>
>
> B) You currently work (or play <G> ) with Object Orientation in COBOL (especially
> with Micro Focus, Fujitsu, or even IBM's 'non-Standard limited OO),
>
> Would you please send me a private email at:
> wmklein <at> ix.netcom.com
>
> I am NOT "trolling" for email addresses and will not pass your email address on.
> However, I do have an "off-list" request that requires my finding OO COBOL (if
> any) people living and working in those specific countries.
>
>
Aw shucks Donald, he's must be thinking of you and me in Canada :-).

Suggestion Bill, subject to what you want the info for. Check with Alan
Wheeler to see if he would have any objections to you posting a similar
message to the M/F Forum. There are very FEW that submit messages about
OO, but there is one in the Czech Republic who is into OO. And why I
suggest the Forum; there are existing users, (probably primarily using
Dialog System), who have indicated that they are getting into dotNet and
that implies OO COBOL for interoperability with either VB or C# perhaps.

Your message here might be an interesting exercise - I have the
impression that the majority of M/F Forum users don't know of/access
comp.lang.cobol - responses to your message above may prove otherwise.

Jimmy

James J. Gavan

2007-04-17, 3:55 am

Rene_Surop wrote:
> Well, I guess I stand corrected.... the conditional statement is "AND"
> and not "OR.
>
> Question though, how is this balloting works anyway? Im from a very
> poor country working my sweat out studying and mastering Cobol for
> 20years now.... even dedicating my entire life for the language and
> yet.....
>
> Nah, it is likely that 3rd world countries do not have resources.
> Period.
>

Rene,

Write to the ISO in Geneva and tell them you have this Shoe Inventory
application written in OO COBOL. All whistles and bells, takes care of
colour co-ordination, even suggests which shoes to wear for a particular
national day. Just plain fantastic.

They want a reference to convince 'em - give 'em the e-mail address for
Imelda Marcos.

I knew you were using Dialog System, (reference your comments to Chris
about the V 5.0 changes to put DS in sync with .Net), but I wasn't aware
that you had gotten into 'pure' OO.

------------------------------------------
As for the balloting you are asking about.

Firstly it is the American ANSI Committee, J4 that deliberates on COBOL.
Anybody, regardless of nationality can be a member of J4 providing they
pay their dues, and attend regularly. (Obviously it also helps if they
are interested in COBOL). They (J4) accept direction from ISO (WG4) on
which topics to pursue, plus anybody can make written
suggestions/recommendations to J4. After J4 have chewed it to death and
converted into nice legal script, they then pass on their musings for
consideration by ISO (WG4).

Are you familiar with the Free Masons ? The COBOL ISO Committee, i.e.
WG4 is tighter than a sheep's arse. Each ISO country interested in COBOL
can have a country-membership for WG4, and the 'member-country' may be
one, two or three people, (nationals from that particular country) - I
don't know the maximum. It's a vote per country, so no indication of who
was there and who was for or against a specific topic. Not too long back
both China (PRC) and Ukraine were supposed to be putting in their two
cents worth on Collections/Dictionaries - but I don't think it ever
happened.

In the due course of time ... how much time have you got ?.....your
suggestion for a new gizmo above, may finish up in the next COBOL
Standard after COBOL 2002 - and that Standard will be 2???.

This link will take you to the J4 site if you want a bit of background
on topics covered and the endless wish-list they still have to handle.
Ignore the first part of the page, scroll down to where topics/papers
are listed by date of submission - particularly the latest ones from
Bill. (Naturally there is no such 'open source' for WG4 ) :-

http://www.cobolstandard.info/j4/index.htm

As you say you are using OO, do you code Collections/Dictionaries much,
(particularly to fill Listboxes, Listviews or DropLists). N/E 'String
Handling Library', for want of a name, covers
characters/arrays/collections/dictionaries and is based on the proven
Smalltalk 80 model. You might want to refer to J4's latest on this topic
- 07-0048, dated March 17 - Bill elsewhere rejected this on behalf of
Micro Focus - compare the J4 document with what is available in Net Express.

The J4 document allows you to add and delete elements from a
collection/dictionary (many forms of the 'add' like 'atput' etc.,
depending upon the collection type you are dealing with). So while you
can add and delete, J4 rejected the suggestion that there should be a
'change' method.

What do I know ? As of Smalltalk 80 there is a method defined as
'replaceWith.." - that's only TWENTY-SEVEN years ago. And in Net Express
I have been using "replaceWith..." against Sorted Collections for the
past TEN years.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bill, help. Can you spell out the steps needed to access the J4 archived
documents for previous years. Chuck got me some references once, but I
didn't ask him how he did it.

Jimmy

James J. Gavan

2007-04-17, 9:55 pm

William M. Klein wrote:
> Just to clarify (a bit) what Jimmy says below and why I was posting my request.
>
> Although WG4 give direction and J4 does the (grunt) work, it is actually ISO/IEC
> JTC1 that does the FINAL voting (approval/disapproval) on international
> Standards. There are currently 5 countries (US, UK, NL, Japan, and Germany)
> that are "active" on WG4. There are 28 (or so) countries that vote on COBOL
> Standards (along with all the other programming language standards and several
> other things). In the recent XML vote, even though 4 of the 5 WG4 countries
> "sent in votes" with comments, the VAST majority of other countries cast
> "approve with no comments" votes. Therefore, although the comments from the 4
> WG4 countries still MAY get "fixed", the XML proposal was "approved" (ballot
> passed) because of the votes of the countries that don't participate in COBOL
> standardization.
>
> As I have indicated before (and will say again), the ISO (and ANSI)
> standardization process is NOT "pretty" and (IMHO) not very effective. HOWEVER,
> it is "what we have at the moment".
>
Bill,

Thanks for the clarification, (or perhaps more accurately, the further
confusion :-) ). I thought I had a handle on this one from some of the
stuff Chuck used to post, plus yours. The whole thing is even worse than
I thought.

Anybody who is interested might want to check out the following :-

http://www.iso.org/iso/en/aboutiso/...bers/index.html

------------------------------------------------------------
ISO is made up of its members which are divided into three categories:

*
Member bodies

A member body of ISO is the national body "most representative of
standardization in its country". Only one such body for each country is
accepted for membership of ISO. Member bodies are entitled to
participate and exercise full voting rights on any technical committee
and policy committee of ISO.
*
Correspondent members

A correspondent member is usually an organization in a country
which does not yet have a fully-developed national standards activity.
Correspondent members do not take an active part in the technical and
policy development work, but are entitled to be kept fully informed
about the work of interest to them.
*
Subscriber members

Subscriber membership has been established for countries with
very small economies. Subscriber members pay reduced membership fees
that nevertheless allow them to maintain contact with international
standardization.

MEMBERS : 158 - national standards bodies, comprising :-

103 - member bodies
46 - correspondent members
9 - subscriber members
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thank God they don't all vote otherwise it could take 100 years to get a
change through !

Rene - there is an entry for the Philippines (BPS) and they are listed
as a Member Body. Apart from the membership costs and your country's own
particular form of bureaucratic bullshit, in theory you could be the
Philippines' WG4 man/team.

Jimmy

James J. Gavan

2007-04-17, 9:55 pm

William M. Klein wrote:
> Sorry Jimmy, but you are still missing a layer (or two) of burocracy.

Thanks and a GROANnnnnnnnn. At least one thing we can agree on. It's a
complete cock-up :-)

Jimmy

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