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

To: xray who wrote (10686)	6/28/1998 7:59:00 PM
From: daffodil	Respond to of 18691

Not a dumb question, xray. In many languages, any field must be designated as either numeric or alphanumeric, and only numeric fields can be used for mathematical operations. One of the problems with these systems is that correction of any errors in code may take hours. If you're lucky, your error will be caught while compiling and a specific error message ("you are trying to add to an alphanumeric field") will be generated. But, depending on how busy the system is with other programs--in other words, how long you must wait to find out that you made a mistake, it can still take hours to find the error, fix the code, recompile and run the program in another batch. If the error is not detected during compilation, it can result in the whole program blowing up when it's run, producing a cryptic "dump" of many pages in Sanskrit--i.e., hexadecimal. Then it can take hours just to find the error. And this is maintenance--meaning that as many as several dozen programmers may have fiddled with this code over the years, producing convoluted logic that defies a simple search for the fieldname "YR," for example. If it's a simple application that only uses the year to print a date on a report, it's probably going to be easy. If it's a payroll program where the date is integral to many substantive aspects of the application, it probably means it's time to redesign the entire payroll system. The good news on these old systems is that the vast majority, if not all, lend themselves readily to advanced testing. With careful planning, their curators should be able to test and integrate revisions successfully well in advance of 1/1/00.