Re: Get current (was: Infinite Loops and Explicit Exits

"Pete Dashwood" <dashwood@enternet.co.nz> wrote in message
news:2vjcqjF2n4hvtU1@uni-berlin.de...

> Now it costs $18 to see a draft,

Correction.  It costs $18 to download your own .pdf copy of the published
standard from ANSI.   It is not a draft.

> $200 to buy a final copy,

Correction.  I think the price is actually $281, and what that gets you is
the same technical material that ANSI distributes for $18 with different
cover pages.    The ISO version is the original, the ANSI version was taken
from it.

Both are published standards, one published by ISO and one published by
ANSI.  You can get either version from the ANSI standards store.

So far as I know, nobody's distributing a printed version.

The only COBOL standards draft I know of still available on the internet is
the working draft of the *next* standard, to which there's a link on the J4
website.  Basically, the stuff marked obsolete in the 2002 standard has been
deleted, and as a result the page and section numbering might differ, but
aside from that it's pretty much the 2002 standard.  (This might change
after the December J4 meeting, at which producing a new draft to include the
changes thus far approved is up for discussion.  The link to the 2002 FCD on
the J4 website appears, unfortunately, to be a dead end.

> and the people
> who do the work either pay for that privelege themselves, or are sponsored
> by their companies.

True enough.

> And ANSI is a non-profit organisation so they don't even
> pay tax on it...

Which is why ANSI charges $18 to defer their costs in maintaining a
repository for, and distributing copies of, this particular standard.
Personally, I think that's pretty darned inexpensive!

-Chuck Stevens