From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,92471489ebbc99c6 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewarr@my-dejanews.com Subject: Re: Y2K Issues Date: 1998/11/08 Message-ID: <7243c1$2db$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 409602753 References: <362B53A3.64E266AB@res.raytheon.com> <362B8D2F.802F42E6@lmco.com> <710nnc$jop@felix.seas.gwu.edu> <713nvs$cv8$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <71acr3$do4$1@husk.cso.niu.edu> <363E5AAC.E2F0AB7D@flinet.com> <71sbsc$5q5$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <720n9r$gk9$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <3643F872.DD14E00@easystreet.com> X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x11.dejanews.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 205.232.38.14 Organization: Deja News - The Leader in Internet Discussion X-Article-Creation-Date: Sun Nov 08 12:38:25 1998 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.04 [en] (OS/2; I) Date: 1998-11-08T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article , jerry@jvdsys.nextjk.stuyts.nl (Jerry van Dijk) wrote: > Most financial software that I am aware of was at that > time not > written in COBOL but PL/1. One reason this is stil done > is to take > advantage of it's 22 digits accuracy. Of course this statement may be true, but it simply means that your experience was by no means representative. PL/1 even at its most successful point, never held a very large share of the financial software market, and was always hugely overshadowed by COBOL. There are many reasons for writing in PL/1 rather than COBOL, but in practice the difference between the 18 vs 22 digits of accuracy is not a very significant one, and of course certainly not relevant to the subject material of this post. Of course PL/1 does have much better data abstraction than COBOL, so one might hope that PL/1 programs would be less sensitive to Y2K problems. Unfortunately, many PL/1 programs were written in COBOL style, and PL/1 goes out of its way to accomodate this style (e.g. allowing completely general use of anonymous types as in COBOL). Thus most PL/1 programs are in practice as bad as COBOL when it comes to Y2K problems, at least that is my experience. Language can make a difference, but often it is not *just* the language, but the general style and approach of the programmers in that language that is as significant. In the case of Ada (let's get back on topic :-) it is most certainly true that the data abstraction in Ada encourages writing programs that are either less likely to have Y2K problems in the first place, or be much easier to correct if such problems exist. However, the important point is that the Ada culture is such that programmers are likely to take full advantage of these abstraction capabilities. COBOL style code in PL/1 does not seem horrible at all, COBOL style code in Ada would be rather disgusting (I am talking now specifically about the style of data declaration and data abstraction). Robert Dewar -----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own