Re: sick and fucking tired of this Y2k shit

[mgraffam@idsi.net]

On Thu, 18 Feb 1999, Sunder wrote:

> Sorry guy, it's not just a weak example, it's a bullshit example. Even if you
> use two bytes, you can encode them as an INT rather than a text field so that
> would get rid of the problem and you'd have a Year 65535 issue.  Sorry, better
> packing and all that.

You've obviously never used COBOL, which, by the way, is exactly what most
of the older code is in. I've never used COBOL. No, really, I haven't..
I plead the 5th, the 5th I say!

Blame the designers of COBOL if you wish; lets face it .. COBOL sucks..
everyone knows it. Bit level manipulation doesn't exist in a lot of COBOL
implementations, so encoding into an INT is basically impossible.. they
don't even exist.

Which means LOTS of assembler code to parse COBOL's record formatting,
lots more code to convert that into a more efficient form, and then store
it. Then, of course, loads more code to get a record, convert back into
a COBOL-friendly datatype so that the business reports can get done up.

On a slow machine with limited RAM, this may not be to feasable to pull
off every time you need to look up John Doe's account information.

Alternatively, you can code the whole show in assembler.. which isn't that
great of an option either in terms of development cost and time.. not to
mention debugging the code after your head programmer takes off and leaves
you with hand optimized, uncommented, purposefully obfusicated (read:
job security) assembler code.

Or, you can not code at all and wait for C.

What I'm saying is, that given the tools and environment at hand, the
two-byte year was a reasonable thing to implement (required under COBOL),
and any code that wanted to use a COBOL-created database had to do it
too. 

There is a lot of good code by good, thoughtful programmers that isn't
64-bit clean.. I have to hack the code to get it to compile on my Alpha. 
They are using C's data types, albeit unconventionally, in an attempt
at efficiency and ease. 

The COBOL guys were using their data types, and were being efficient. 

When the Merced comes out, we'll see of a bunch of people running around
trying to fix 32-bit programming for a 64-bit world.. its the same
sort of thing, really. 

Michael J. Graffam (mgraffam@idsi.net)
"86% of conspiracy theories have some basis in truth... but, oddly enough,
it's that last 14% that usually gets you killed." 
    --Talas (http://cadvantage.com/~algaeman/conspiracy/public.htm)