Subject: SC22 N2995 - PL/I Project Editor Report - PLENARY AGENDA ITEM

From: William Rinehuls <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1999 17:00:33 -0400 (EDT)

__________________ beginning of title page __________________________
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22
Programming languages, their environments and system software interfaces
Secretariat:  U.S.A.  (ANSI)

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22
N2995

TITLE:
PL/I Project Editor Report for the September 1999 JTC 1/SC22 Plenary -
PLENARY AGENDA ITEM

DATE ASSIGNED:
1999-09-13

SOURCE:
Secretariat, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22

BACKWARD POINTER:
N/A

DOCUMENT TYPE:
Project Editor Report

PROJECT NUMBER:
JTC 1.22.05, JTC 1.22.06

STATUS:
Discussion of this document will be an agenda item for the September 1999
JTC 1/SC22 Plenary.

ACTION IDENTIFIER:
FYI

DUE DATE:
N/A

DISTRIBUTION:
Text

CROSS REFERENCE:
N/A

DISTRIBUTION FORM:
Def

Address reply to:
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 Secretariat
William C. Rinehuls
8457 Rushing Creek Court
Springfield, VA 22153 USA
Telephone:  +1 (703) 912-9680
Fax:  +1 (703) 912-2973
email:  [email-masked]

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PL/I PROJECT EDITOR REPORT FOR THE SEPTEMBER 1999 JTC 1/SC22 PLENARY

Project 97.22.5:  Revision of ISO 6160 "Programming Language PL/I"

Existing standard.  No activities or requests for additions or 
clarifications during the last year.  ANSI reaffirmed the underlying
document, ANS X3.53-1976 (previously reaffirmed 1993 and earlier),
during the reporting year for an additional five years.  ISO 6160 is
now scheduled for review, and we recommend that it should be
reaffirmed: the Standard is stable and has reference value for
existing implementations and users.  However, as noted below, the
DATE function provided in this Standard must be used with care during
and after the century transition.

Project 97.22.6:  ISO 6522 "General Purpose PL/I"

No requests for clarifications or extensions in the last year. During
the reporting year, ANSI reaffirmed the parallel and textually
identical national document, ANS X3.74-1987, previously reaffirmed
1993, for an additional five years.  The reasons for this exactly
parallel the recommendation made to SC22 in 1996: the language it
defines is still in active use in many locations and that the
availability of the Standard continues to be of use in procurements
and in assessing conformance and interoperability.

Other Issues

While the internal format for storing dates is strictly
implementation dependent and most known implementations do not
have formats that would interact with Y2K issues, IS 6160 provides 
a "DATE" function that returns a two-digit year, with all the
vunerabilities that implies.  A replacement DATETIME function was
introduced into IS 6522 for the explicit purpose of providing a
mechanism that would not be Y2K-sensitive (see Annex B), but no
action was ever taken to explicitly deprecate DATE.  If there is
a choice for any new development, IS 6522 continues to represent
better practice than IS 6160 for this and other reasons.

Otherwise, there are no significant outstanding issues affecting
the PL/I standards.  We remain interested in the future of other
standards defined using formal or semi-formal methods, as we have
concluded that these are not consistent with easy or rapid
revisions or updates.

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