Cobol history question -- lawsuit against standards committee
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From: beliavsky on 18 May 2005 16:13 In comp.lang.fortran , a reliable person recently wrote that Travellers Inc (the insurance company?) sued the Cobol standards committee, I think (based on the post) in the 1980s. Can anyone shed light on this? I am just wondering on what basis a standards committee could be sued. One can search "cobol fortran 2008" in comp.lang.fortran to find the message I am talking about.
From: Richard on 18 May 2005 16:32 > Can anyone shed light on this? Google should be your friend. It found this in about 0.1 seconds. """ In the early o1980s, COBOL bashing took a turn for the worse. Serious efforts were underway to "kill" COBOL. In preparation for the publication of ISO/ANSI COBOL 85, there were serious legal and lobbying attempts (led by Travelers Insurance and joined by other respectable corporations) to block any new COBOL standardization effort. Some wanted to freeze the COBOL language as described in the ANSI COBOL 74 standard. Others wanted to roll back the COBOL standard to its "official" COBOL 68 version. The argument offered by these groups was that it involved a great corporate cost to update their enterprise applications in order for older COBOL programs to compile cleanly in newer COBOL compilers. No one told them that they didn't need to recompile any programs unless the business application required updating."""
From: William M. Klein on 18 May 2005 16:40 For someone who knows COBOL, this "law suit" (I think it was threatened not submitted - but I could be in error on this) is what (eventually) led to the new "OBSOLETE" classification in the '85 Standard. The initial draft of what eventually became the '85 Standard actually DROPPED several (all? many?) of the items that eventually were classified as "OBSOLETE". By the time the '85 Standard was approved, these items were "kept in" BUT the Standard said they would be dropped from the next revision (and in deed they were - in the '02 Standard). The '02 Standard introduced "ARCHAIC" as well as "OBSOLETE'. These were items identified as in "too wide a use" to be dropped in the next Standard but when/if they ever were NOT used widely, they MIGHT become OBSOLETE (and then dropped). All of this, of course, has NOTHING to do with what implementor have (and continue to) do, i.e. I haven't heard of any implementors "rushing" to drop support (as an extension) of any of the '85 Standard "Obsolete" items (with the possible exception of the ENTER statement which was always something of an oddity - and some items that were OPTIONAL in the '85 Standard and not supported universally in the first place). -- Bill Klein wmklein <at> ix.netcom.com <beliavsky(a)aol.com> wrote in message news:1116447182.706044.116990(a)g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com... > In comp.lang.fortran , a reliable person recently wrote that Travellers > Inc (the insurance company?) sued the Cobol standards committee, I > think (based on the post) in the 1980s. Can anyone shed light on this? > I am just wondering on what basis a standards committee could be sued. > > One can search "cobol fortran 2008" in comp.lang.fortran to find the > message I am talking about. >
From: Clark Morris on 24 May 2005 13:40 On 18 May 2005 13:32:13 -0700, "Richard" <riplin(a)Azonic.co.nz> wrote: >> Can anyone shed light on this? > >Google should be your friend. It found this in about 0.1 seconds. > >""" In the early o1980s, COBOL bashing took a turn for the worse. >Serious efforts were underway to "kill" COBOL. In preparation for >the publication of ISO/ANSI COBOL 85, there were serious legal and >lobbying attempts (led by Travelers Insurance and joined by other >respectable corporations) to block any new COBOL standardization >effort. Some wanted to freeze the COBOL language as described in the >ANSI COBOL 74 standard. Others wanted to roll back the COBOL standard >to its "official" COBOL 68 version. The argument offered by these >groups was that it involved a great corporate cost to update their >enterprise applications in order for older COBOL programs to compile >cleanly in newer COBOL compilers. No one told them that they didn't >need to recompile any programs unless the business application required >updating.""" The complaint was not that new things were being added but rather that current syntax was being dropped. In addition the interpretation of current syntax was being changed. The classic case of change I have yet to understand is from EXAMINE to INSPECT. The ALTER verb was being dropped. As I pointed out in the SHARE COBOL project at the time, people should be barred from using it in new programs but I would hate to not have been able to recompile the payroll and marketing programs I wrote in the late 1960's and early 1970's just because the compiler changed. (The payroll programs were later replaced by a package and needed a major rewrite if they were to survive. The marketing programs lasted far longer than they should for various reasons. I hope they aren't still running.) The problem was two fold. The first was where the COBOL committee was changing existing standardized syntax by deletion (ALTER), replacement (EXAMINE by INSPECT) or change in definition. This was in the control of the committee. The second was where vendor interpretations, extended use of standardized syntax or common extensions were being replaced by specific standards. This meant that at least some come would have to be changed. Upward compatibility is very important in the mainframe world (IBM, Unisys, Tandem now a part of HP, etc) and probably now in enterprise Linux, Unix and Windows environments with thousands of programs.
From: Howard Brazee on 24 May 2005 13:59
On 24-May-2005, Clark Morris <cfmtech(a)istar.ca> wrote: > The classic case of change I have > yet to understand is from EXAMINE to INSPECT Don't forget TRANSFORM in there. I converted code twice to do the same thing. |