By the way, I'd like to add the IBM's infamous Report Program Generator (RPG) as another major culprit on your list of languages for the Y2K problem. During 60s, IBM in response for acute shortage of programmers, designed RPG as a programming language to be used by accountants. It accepts data in fixed formats similar to ledgers and, yes, it routinely used 2 digit for the year field.
RPG-III (IV) is still a very active programming language. The statement that it was designed as a programming language to be used by accountants is curious to me. If I give you the benefit of the doubt and say, Novice Investor may be right about the very earliest beta versions of RPG (like talking about beta "A" versus the "C++" of today), I'll say it is barely possible this bizarre statement is true. However, RPG-III of today is in no way an accountant's programming language. It is a full featured programming language. And a language with billions of lines of code out there. The similarity of fixed formats to ledgers is absolutely nil. The "routinely used 2 digit for the year field" statement is of questionable truth value, too. Yes, lots of programs in every language have two year dates. But no aspect of RPG led programmers astray to using 2 digits when they should have used 4.
I really find the over truth value of the RPG section in your post to be pretty low, and certainly misleading about what RPG-III (IV) is today.
On the other hand, if you are primarily trying to point out that there is a lot of RPG code out there, you are indeed right.
|
