Subject: N 3912-German Comments on N 3872, Registration and Approval Lette r Ballot for ISO/IEC PDTR 24716, Information technology-Programming langu ages, their environment and system software interfaces-Native COBOL Synta x for XML Support

From: Sally Seitz <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 11:45:11 -0400

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22

Programming languages, their environments and system software interfaces

Secretariat:  U.S.A.  (ANSI)

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 N3912

TITLE:

German Comments on N 3872, Registration and Approval Letter Ballot for
ISO/IEC PDTR 24716, Information technology-Programming languages, their
environment and system software interfaces-Native COBOL Syntax for XML
Support

DATE ASSIGNED:

2005-006-09

SOURCE:

SC 22 Secretariat 

BACKWARD POINTER:

DOCUMENT TYPE:

National Body Comments

PROJECT NUMBER:

STATUS:  

These additional comments received from the UK are sent to SC 22/WG 4 for
consideration when resolving the comments contained in SC 22 N 3908. 

ACTION IDENTIFIER:

ACT

DUE DATE:

DISTRIBUTION:

TEXT

CROSS REFERENCE:

SC 22 N 3872, N3908

DISTRIBUTION FORM:

Def

Address reply to:

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 Secretariat

Sally Seitz

ANSI

25 West 43rd Street

New York, NY  10036

Telephone:  (212) 642-4918

Fax:             (212) 840-2298

Email:  [email-masked] 

______________end of cover sheet, beginning of document__________

German Comment on N3872

The purpose of this proposal is to define a COBOL interface to an existing
"language" defined in an external standard or quasi-standard. The approach
taken is highly dependent on the stability and reliability of this external
documentation, in this case "W3C recommendations". Such a dependency is
extremely risky, because the reference can change at any time, and maybe
eventually overridden by a completely new paradigm. It must be noted that
this is not (yet?) even an ISO standard. The proposed  extensions and
modifications of the COBOL language are quite pervasive and will add to the
complexity, volatility, and size of the language and thus negatively affect
the acceptance of the COBOL language.

This proposal reminds of at least two similar attempts to adopt externally
defined technologies: 

-          The COBOL Codasyl Database support, which never was accepted by
the industry and was eventually superseded by SQL. The approach taken by
SQL, an  "imbedded language" interface, which has only a minimal impact on
the COBOL language itself, has been extremely successful and turned out as
the de-facto database standard. J4 has never sufficiently verified, whether
a similar approach might have been feasible for XML just as well. 

-          The COBOL Communication module, which also never took off, mainly
because it failed to address transaction based communication. Interestingly,
there is a very successful alternative, at least on IBM mainframes, the CICS
system, which also uses an embedded language interface for COBOL. 

We are concerned that this proposal may have a similar fate as the above
examples. We should thoroughly monitor the acceptance of this TR and not
exclude the possibility of a failure.

Sally Seitz

Program Manager

ANSI

25 West 43rd Street

New York, NY 10036

Phone: (212) 642-4918

Fax: (212) 840-2298