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Strategies & Market Trends : Roger's 1998 Short Picks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neil_L who wrote (10667)	6/27/1998 11:32:00 AM
From: James Unterburger	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 18691

I can't believe that old programs (or new programs for that matter, "well into the nineties") would actually use ASCII byte representation for the Year field of any data structure. Everyone talks about the year being coded as "YY" which I presume means ASCII, i.e., character representation (string) of a numerical quantity. Why didn't they use integer or long integer to represent the Year as a numerical quantity. Heck even 8 bits gives you a range of 256 years. How could anyone be so stupid as to hold numbers in their ASCII form in a database? Unless COBOL sucked so bad that that's all you had. Obviously FORTRAN had numerical data types, the problems were with characters in that language.

To: Neil_L who wrote (10667)	6/27/1998 2:49:00 PM
From: put2rich	Respond to of 18691

<<Roger, as a fellow programmer, I disagree with you completely. There are many billions of lines of code written in COBOL alone that are still in use>> Which applications those Cobol programs were written for? Mostly in finance, payroll ... on main frames (just wonder since I am not familiar)? I believe the relative numbers of main frames are dropping. Also many are replacing old softwares/systems with Oracle, SAP, Peoplesoft etc... for y2k compliance. Besides zitl, vias, ddim I remember some hot discussions about other y2k high fliers couple months ago, any still short those?