My major concerns relate to the scope of the standard. This was probably reasonable given the limited capabilities of machines at the time, but seems excessive now. In contrast, the new standard has only one level and very few options, in fact a lot of people feel there are too few options. Report writer is mandatory, although it is not used in a lot of customer sites. The screen IO section is mandatory, but processor dependent, which means there is a loophole for the compiler writer who wants to avoid supporting it.
Object orientation is mandatory, including garbage collection.
It will be quite difficult to write a compiler and run time that will give good performance and predictable response times in interactive applications because of the requirement to support garbage collection - ask any Java programmer if their application freezes for a while every so often. Object orientation carries a lot of baggage that makes compilers bigger and slower and that makes it more difficult to generate fast object code. There is no requirement for vendors to document the limitations of their compilers. For example if there is a limit of 100 forward paragraph or section references, there is no requirement to document this. In most cases there are no minimum requirements for program size or complexity that have to be supported.