Assessing the impact of revisions to standards: the COBOL example☆

Abstract The advantages to be gained from the enhancement of standards for programming languages must be weighed against the costs of the associated conversion of existing code. Such an evaluation should address all of the potential costs and benefits; in particular, it must take into account the current operational environment, as well as the technical issues. A candidate set of criteria to guide this process is presented and discussed. COBOL is a good example of how language standards evolve. There is a review of the findings of a recent Federal study on the impact of currently proposed changes to the COBOL standard. This review made use of interviews with Federal users and also an extensive analysis of currently operational COBOL source code within the Federal government. The study demonstrates that the evaluation of revisions to standards can be done, in part, on a quantitative basis.