The first draft proposal for standards for object-oriented Cobol has now been written and will be passed to the X3J4 Technical Committee, which develops Cobol standards, for review in the first week of December. If accepted, it will go to the X3J4.1 sub-committee, which focuses specifically on object-oriented Cobol, at its next meeting in January – if not, in March. A working draft is scheduled to be sent to national bodies worldwide on December 1 1994. These bodies will take comments from any interested organisations and the review period will last for five months. The same process will be repeated the following year, and finally on October 1 1996, a draft international standard will be sent to the national bodies. This final review should last six months. The standard is scheduled for general release in early 1994, and will definitely include a version for an international character set; an exception handling facility; file share and record locking support; and enhancements to call statements, so Cobol can interact with C, C++ and other programming languages.