October 2004

COBOL SIG studies its sunset at HP World

MPE group may advocate COBOL interests in future

By Steve Hammond

Sometimes you think that if things didn’t change, something is wrong. As with life, business and the HP 3000 world, SIG-COBOL is faced with a change.

At the 2004 HP World SIG-COBOL meeting in Chicago’s massive McCormick Center, long-time SIG chairwoman Jeannette Nutsford tendered her resignation from the Special Interest Group. The realities of business and life, along with the huge amount of time she and her husband Ken spend away from their New Zealand home, seemed to lead to her decision.

The question then at hand was what to do with the SIG. No one has volunteered to assume the reins, so the options are fairly limited. The SIG could cease to exist, or it could have its objectives merged into those of another SIG, either SIG-Migrate or SIG-MPE. The latter’s chairwoman, Donna Garverick, spoke up at the COBOL meeting, saying the COBOL group was welcome in the MPE fold, but any time that happens, most of its focus gets lost. Ultimately, Nutsford announced that she will put out notices to the SIG-COBOL membership that if no one comes forward in a month to assume the leadership of the group, SIG-COBOL will officially merge with SIG-MPE. Requiem in pace.

The meeting then moved on to user presentations discussing conversions of HP 3000 COBOL applications to other platforms. Customers sketched out conversions using Fujitsu’s ..NET COBOL and MicroFocus COBOL. Both had fairly uneventful conversions, although one encountered problems converting the Omnidex third party index calls to IMAGE into the proper database calls on the new platform.

The business part of the meeting ended with a short presentation by the group’s representative on the J4 Committee, Bob Karlin of Karlin’s Korner. The J4 Committee is creating the standards for the next iteration of COBOL — COBOL 2008. The committee hopes to have the new standards in final form shortly.

The COBOL 2008 standard will include many new capabilities and features, including the one that Nutsford has been promoting for several years — dynamic capacity tables, as part of the new standard. The dynamic capacity tables capability is a significant step forward. In the past, the maximum size of a table is determined at compile time. If the program is written to expect a maximum of 100 items in the table and this limit exceeded, the program ends in an error condition or it provides inaccurate or garbled output. Dynamic capacity tables will allow the table to expand as the number of items increases.

The new standard will also include native syntax to access XML files, support for ISO date functionality, and a COBOL Collection Class Library. The committee is also trying to include date and time math and elementary string items, time permitting.

Karlin explained that the committee intends to issue new standards for COBOL every five to seven years in the future. He also mentioned that J4 meetings are open to the public and all interested parties are invited to attend. The next meeting will be held in the Sacramento area from December 6-11 and the following meeting will be in the Los Angeles area February 7-11, 2005. For more details, contact him at bobkarlin@karlinskorner.com.

The meeting then went from all business to all fun. Fueled by refreshments sponsored by Neal Harvey Associates, the group got into a very heated competition during the HP 3000 Trivia Contest. With a variety of prizes at stake, laughter, groans of dismay and passionate entreaties filled the room. Luckily, fisticuffs were avoided and the police were not needed.

As the meeting closed, the Nutsfords bade everyone goodbye, with promises to stay in touch and work with all to continue to keep COBOL a viable language in the HP community.

Steve Hammond is an HP systems manager at the Association of American Medical Colleges and the NewsWire’s Inside VEsoft columnist.