Re: The disturbing myth of Eiffel portability

[cjames3@ibm.net (The Rt Rev'd Colin James III, KOTM 1/96)]

Eoin Woods is deluded in the article quoted below.  

Almost all banks still do most of their processing in COBOL.

All new development in US banks with European branches is in C++ back end
and many front ends (none in Eiffel that I know of).  This is partly due to
C with its silly pointers not scaling well and mostly due to floating point
problems at run time in C.

Case in point:  one of the 10-largest US banks with European branches just
killed a 5 year old derivatives project in C, fired everyone involved, and
wrote off $25 MM.  (Case in point: that's yet another example of C hackers,
such as Eoin, banging on Un*x boxes.)  The same vice-president at that bank
also told me that they are not interested at all in CALfp's "laughable"
Rainbow derivative's project in Eiffel "because it's still in C" and "those
bozos in France still haven't learned about C yet".

While none of the banks above are The Nancy Bank of Watford, Hertfordshire,
UK, please tell the readers here, Eoin [sic], did you "consult" there too?

----------------

From: Eoin@copse.demon.co.uk (Eoin Woods)
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.eiffel,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.object
Subject: Re: The disturbing myth of Eiffel portability
Date: Sun, 17 Nov 96 16:42:18 GMT
Organization: At Home
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In article <3294e64b.74799475@news2.ibm.net>
           cjames3@ibm.net "The Rt Rev'd Colin James III, KOTM 1/96" writes:

> In other words, the reason that banks generally have learned to avoid C
due
> to floating point problems is not solved at all but rather propagated and
> worsened by the questionable strategic decision to adopt Eiffel.
This is abolute rubbish!  (As usual from CJIII).  I work (as a consultant)
at
banks a LOT - they ALL use C as a mainstream development language (whether
or not they *should* is a different question!)

Eoin.
-- 
Eoin Woods, Watford, Hertfordshire, WD1 1PD, UK
Email:      Eoin@copse.demon.co.uk


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