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Jerry Garfunkel
While sitting at hundreds of ANSI, ISO, CODASYL, PLSG, SPARC, WG4, CEG, ECMA, SMTG, OOC, WG11, X3J4, SC22 committee meetings and speaking at hundreds more GUIDE, SHARE, HLSUA, DECUS, ACM, IEEE, AFIPS, ISECON conferences, in Europe, South America, Africa, Asia and the US, I found myself "doodling" a lot. Being a lover of letters, my doodling was my handwriting practice. Mixed in with all of my meeting and conference and panel notes over 20 + years, are hundreds of pages that look like this.
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OMG is the Object Management Group, a consortium of IT companiesdefining common object libraries. OO COBOL, to be a player in the OO application development community, must assure that it is compatible with CORBA protocol. Technical issues discussed included recursion, polymorphism, conformance, invocation exception processing, instance, persistence, prototypes, inheritance, services and methods, class and subclass, libraries, reusability dynamic and static data,
More warnings about the direction of OO COBOL away from COBOL programmers. |
This was a joint meeting of the American COBOL committee and the Object Oriented COBOL committee. It contains an early warning that the Object Oriented features (syntax and semantics being added to COBOL would be alien to COBOL programmers while appealing to OO designers/programmers, thus hampering the introduction of OO COBOL into the COBOL development community.
User-defined functions can be included in COBOL via the OO module and newly-defined methods or via the Intrinsic Functions facility in COBOL. Some of the technical issues discussed at this meeting included object oriented COBOL multiple inheritance, static (bound) objects, independent methods (functions) |
At a joint meeting of the American COBOL Committee (ANSI X3J4) and the Object Oriented COBOL Committe in Seattle/Bellevue Washington in March, 1993, debate continued over the accelerated introduction of Object Oriented COBOL syntax into the official COBOL standard in time for it to be useful. It was precisely for such large features like object oriented COBOL and Functions, et al, that the amendment process was first proposed in 1984 and adopted by the international COBOL committee. It was a mechanism to introduce advanced features into the COBOL language without having to wait 11 - 16 years between official COBOL Standard revisions. During much of my tenure as an active member on the ANSI X3J4 committee (NCITS J4) There was a running debate between those who wanted to accelerate the standardization process and those that didn't.
One afternoon during the week, I gave a 3-hour presentation on the new COBOL 2002 features at the Red Lion Inn in Bellevue Washington. (Of course I didn't know it would be called COBOL 2002 at the time; I was more confident and referred to it as COBOL 9X.
Letters are comprised of strokes. Life is comprised of kindnesses.
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Colleague and friend Don Nelson - the Godfather of COBOL - created masterpieces of doodling art at each meeting. I wonder if (and hope) Don saved his "doodles." |
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Dan Clark, then of Micro Focus, formerly of IBM, was asked to give a tutorial presentation on object oriented concepts to the international COBOL committee members who were meeting in Zaandam, Netherlands (outside of Amsterdam). This joint meeting with the International COBOL committee (ISO) and the Object Oriented COBOL Task Group (OOCTG, later to become X3J4.1) was organized for OOCTG to get general direction from the internationalCOBOL community. I chaired the WG4 session.
Early debate regarding syntax and constituency. |
This was the 13th International COBOL Committee meeting held in Newbury England in August, 1993 - hosted by Micro Focus. Object oriented COBOL syntax and features (Persistence dominated the technical discussions. Having gotten to know my fellow COBOL colleagues over the years, I observed, bellies. I have seen my French, Dutch, English, Canadian, Japanese, American friends get older!!! Their bellies enlarge, their hair whiten, their eyeglasses thicken. |
The US TAG is the Technical Advisory Group that officially represents the United States in ISO (international standards) matters. Approximately one month prior to each international COBOL committee meeting, the US TAG would meet to "rehearse" delegation positions and "tactics." If one ever thought that business is not political, come to a TAG meeting. The Republican and Democratic caucuses in Congress have similar strategic meetings.
Emerging from this meeting was the US delegation's priority list of critical issues to be discussed by WG4 which included: MOCS (multi-octet character sets), Exception handling, obsolete language elements, CALL bindings, Object Oriented COBOL, Bit and Boolean data and operations. MOCS is taking on the highest priority in deference to the Asian, Mid-eastern and other countries whose native character sets require double-byte representation. |
At an international COBOL Committee meeting in Vienna, Austria, in 1984, the COBOL language was in serious trouble of slipping into extinction.The legal and procedural fight over the publication of the updated COBOL 85 standard resulted in a 5-yeare delay. The delay was caused by a deluge of letters sent to the ANSI X3J4 COBOL technical committee by business men and women, protesting the upcoming revision of the ANSI Standard COBOL language. Even with extreme sensitivity to upward compatibility of users application programs, there were some instances where the behavior of application programs compiled with an ANSI COBOL 74 compliant compiler might behave differently than that same program compiled with an ANSI COBOL 85 compliant compiler. In order to give due respect to this concern while at the same time not let this upward compatibility problem interfer with the introduction of new features into the COBOL language, I proposed the introduction of an "Amendment" process to the COBOL ANSI and ISO procedures. These new COBOL compilers with the new additions (amendments) would assure complete compatibility with older programs. The first of the ANSI COBOL amendments was the Intrinsic Fucntions Addendum published in 1989. |
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The 12th meeting of the international COBOL committee (ISO SC22/WG4 - formerly the COBOL Experts Group) was held in Holland, in June 1992.
Often, at international meetings held in Europe, visitors are invited to present papers and proposals as well as contribute to debate of the technical issues. These visitors occasionally are designated to represent their country delegations. John Piggott and Rod Grealish are two such distinguished guests at this European gathering. Noticeable for their absence at this meeting was the French delegation - lack of funding. |
The international (ISO) COBOL committee meeting in Kissimmee, Florida, established a cut-off date of February 26, 1993 for consideration of new features into the next COBOL standard (COBOL 2002). Effectively, no new technology beyond 1993 is incorporated in COBOL 2002. Attending the meeting near Disneyworld were representatives from Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands, England and the United States. When I first joined the COBOL standardization community in 1979, I had just created Jerome Garfunkel Associates, inc. One mission of my business was that it require me to travel. |
| Bill Klein was (and still is) one of the "geniuses" in the COBOL community. Bill is driven by his passion to make one thing in life, the COBOL language, as perfect as possible. Mixed with an incredible intellect, Bill is one of the key assets built into the COBOL language that the public doesn't know about. Bill and I have been on opposite sides of critical issues in the standaards community; these issues were administrative (mostly procedural) rather than language-specific.. I've always bowed (and still do) to Bill's knowledge of COBOL and his experience in the software support field. |
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There was a straw vote to withdraw the "Corrections Amendment." The "corrections amendment" was a perversion of the "Amendment process" that I had proposed in Vienna in 1984 as a means of speeding up the COBOL standardization process. These new procedures were adopted by ANSI and ISO and resulted in the early release of COBOL with intrinsic functions. It turned out to be the only "new feature" amendment added to COBOL ahead of schedule. There are many times that I vote against my own best interest - as in this straw vote where I abstained. Usually it is for parliamentary and procedural purposes.
The JOD refers to the "journal of development." The JOD was the active "live" current document containing the "conceptual" COBOL language. It was from the JOD that features were selected for inclusion in the ANSI and ISO COBOL standards |
Wim Ebbinkhuijsen, Dutch computer scientist and active member in the International COBOL community, hosted many meetings in the Netherlands. He hosted the 12th meeting of the international COBOL Committee, in 1992. Each day many committee members comuted between Zaandam and Amsterdam. Wim was honored in 2005 for his lifetime contribution to the COBOL language.
It struck me that the politics of giving birth to a nation shared some things with the politics of giving birth to a programming language. Inherent in any consensus process (i.e. by committee, by congress) is politics - factions vying and jockeying for position. At some point in both systems, authority (power) becomes its own reward - worth protecting.
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The last CODASYL COBOL Committee (CCC) meeting was held in La Jolla California in January 1992.
This was a historic joint meeting of ANSI X3J4 and the CODASYL COBOL Committee. Born in 1959, the CODASYL COBOL Committee ceased to exist on 17 January 1992. The CCC membership and activities were merged into the technical development work of ANSI X3J4. New development/standardization procedures had to be defined since the COBOL JOD, maintained by the CCC, was "frozen." Many members of the CODASYL COBOL Committee (like myself) were also members of the ANSI X3J4 COBOL Technical Committee for many years. One effect of this "political" merger, was a lot less traveling. The original separation of COBOL language development work (mostly technical, handled by the CCC) and administrative standardization work (handled by ANSI X3J4), became less clear over 33 years as the ANSI X3J4 COBOL committee continually became involved in language development issues (technical).
Jim Pantaija was a former chairperson of the ANSI X3J4 COBOL Technical Committee and a friend of many members. |
| Bruce Miller, DEC, was one of the quiet respected voices on the CODASYL COBOL committee (CCC). Bruce and a small handful of others over the years, were listened to more than others. A group of the CCC members who rendezvoused approximately every 8 weeks around the US, used to find a local Racketball Club in whatever city we were meeting in and we would play Racketball to keep our minds and bodies healthy. Bruce Miller, Don Schricker and I were among the regular players. However they lasted longer than I did. |
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| Every letter in the alphabet is made up of strokes. There are a finite number of different strokes that can create all 26 capital and lowercase letters. Here they are with some redundancy |
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The proposal to digitize the Standards Procedures was first introduced to ANSI in 1987 |
| Marilyn Sander, IBM representative on the CODASYL COBOL Ccommittee, had one of the toughest jobs in the standards community. Because of IBM's dominant position in the IT hardware world, there was a tendency to want to "bring IBM down a peg" and to challenge their software development methodology. She was outstanding. |
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