The drive towards object-oriented Cobol has taken a step closer to becoming reality as the result of a decision by the X3J4 Technical Committee for Cobol standardisation. Following three days of presentation and debate of the object-oriented features in a Technical Report presented in March, the committee of 14 corporate members decided these should be part of the earliest possible revision to the Cobol Standard – that won’t be before 1997. The features include instantiation through a class definition, invocation of objects using a messaging protocol, class inheritance, polymorphism, static and dynamic binding, use of object interfaces to separate definitions from implementations, and interface checking (with the ability to disable it for rapid prototyping). Raymond Obin of Micro Focus Plc has agreed to write a proposal for detailed changes to Cobol to enable the object-oriented features now agreed upon.
