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From: kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)
Subject: Re: Clear Screen
Date: 1997/03/06
Message-ID: <1997Mar6.153855.1@eisner>#1/1
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References: <97030410484075@psavax.pwfl.com> <dewar.857654191@merv>
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Date: 1997-03-06T00:00:00+00:00
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In article <dewar.857654191@merv>, dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
> One more point about obsolescent features. In my experience, language
> designers tend to have far too little appreciation of the difficulty
> of modifying code to deal with incomaptibilities. I often here statements
> like: well it is easy to go through the code and do xxx. The fact is that
> nothing is easy when you are dealing with millions of lines of code.

Each year I talk to a different class of 100 or so folk from different
companies, and my polling indicates that about 10% are running business
applications where nobody left at the company knows the language used
to implement that application.  When the time comes that someone has
to reach in and change 2 digit years to 4 digit years, it would be very
unsafe to force them to change other parts of the program just because
the compiler that runs on the current version of the operating system
does not support the old dialect.

Larry Kilgallen