Re: FAQ and string functions

[Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>]

Darren New <dnew@san.rr.com> writes:

> Your experience may differ, but in my experience, I've never spent less than
> a month writing a program that is still running 20 years later. :-)

We have scripts written in Perl (etc) that have lasted many years (since
before I joined the company).  I suspect they were written in less than
a month (each).  More like an hour each.  But we've spent untold hours
maintaining them.

I'm talking about things like, "zip up a bunch of files for a release,
put it in the version 1.234 release directory, run some regression
tests, and then send some mail to somebody-or-other notifying them of
something-or-other."

I wish they were all written in a language that had Perl's features for
doing stuff, and Ada's features for making it work reliably.

- Bob