Re: Today (Feb 26) IBM announcements

On Thu, 28 Feb 2008 06:10:28 GMT, "William M. Klein"
<wmklein@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>Clark,
>  This was NOT a set of announcement for programming languages (or most 
>programming tools).  There weren't new releases of IMS, CICS, or DB2. 
Even 
>Language Environment was only included in the "preview" of z/OS 1.10.
>
>I think that you (Clark) are well aware that there are some '02 Standard 
>features that IBM Enterprise COBOL programmers would like (table sort, 
>initialize enhancements, even EXIT enhancements) while there are others
they do 
>NOT want (free form reference format that is available almost everywhere
is NOT 
>popular with IBM mainframe COBOL programmers, certainly VALIDATE and
enhanced 
>RE****T WRITE are questionable).
>
>I am not at SHARE this week, but recent indications from IBM are that
they are 
>getting more resources to meet existing SHARE (and other user)
requirements for 
>COBOL.  If this is true, I would expect significant enhancements to COBOL
in the 
>next 18 months or so.  However, who knows for sure.
>
>P.S.  The recent V4.0 announcement did meet a couple of SHARE
requirements 
>including ZIIP sup****t for COBOL/XML and a separate "compiler options"
file.

The announcement for decimal floating point specifically noted the
sup****t for it in C/C++ and PL/1.  Most of the other new facilities
seem to be underneath the covers type sup****t.