This is the place to come if you want to hear about the various new clauses, phrases, and statements in the latest COBOL Standards.
Additions to the various IBM COBOL products come from a variety of sources; customer requests, additions to support IBM Hardware, and of course additions based on the COBOL Standards.
In this Blog I'll point out which new features in an IBM COBOL product owe its life to the COBOL Standard.
Before we go any further, i'll say a word or two about myself. I've been developing Compilers and related tools for over 20 years. During that time I have worked on Compilers for Basic, COBOL, Fortran, and PL/1. I have a background in IBM Midrange including the System/36, System/38, AS/400, and iSeries. I have been part of a team that wrote a COBOL compiler from scratch, and have been active in various Language Standards for over 10 years.
I am currently a member of INCITS/PL22.4, COBOL Task Group, and am also a member of the Standards Council of Canada (SCC) Programming languages Group (*CAC/JTC1/SC22*).
My current job involves working with the various COBOL Standard organizations; including the development of the latest 20xx COBOL Standard, as well as the development of COBOL for AIX.
Which brings us to the latest release of COBOL for AIX, version 3.1. This version of COBOL was released early this year. It includes many things, including 64 bit support. But for the moment I wanted to talk about the new NATIONAL data types.
The 2002 COBOL standard included content for Internationalization and Localization. The existing USAGE clause now allows the NATIONAL keyword. Although it is not necessary that NATIONAL be implemented as a Unicode type, in COBOL for AIX, NATIONAL is Unicode UTF-16.
