At 02:14 AM 9/21/03 -0400, Kevin Tarr wrote:We are getting Object Oriented COBOL soon.
Isn't that sort of an oxymoron, like attaching a jet engine to a covered wagon?
-- Ronn! :)
I cannot say. Here's what I've been told: we always have vendors trying to get our company to use newer languages but so far none of them can read our databases and do tasks as fast as COBOL. We have systems that process millions and tens of millions of records. I do not know how that compares with other systems and their size. I can imagine that Amazon's Oracle database has as many or more records, but I doubt it works on all of them in one pass. (I may be overstating or even understating what is going on. Of course with a different language there are different ways to do things, that not every record would have to be processed every time. But I'm assuming the people pushing the new languages know this and still cannot get their programs to out perform our current setup.)
Of course even if some new language was found to be a marked improvement, it would be tough to switch out a legacy system. We just went through a process of increasing the record length for a system (and moving/renaming some fields) . Our group had to inspect every program to see where changes needed to be made to match the new size. While some new programs were written, with the old programs all we were allowed to do was check them and make as little change as necessary. Some of mine were so garbled I wanted to rip them apart and re-write but I couldn't. It was a three month project for eleven people, not counting the users. Five days after it was finished I found a mistake in one of my programs. I didn't do anything wrong, the program invoked something that was defined outside of my program. I assumed it was the correct size, because other far more important programs used this invoke, while mine just used it as a reference. It wouldn't have been noticed until end of year processing when a lot of bad data would have been written.
That too long story is showing what pains we'd have to go through if we threw everything out and used a different language. So far I've helped build from scratch one system and the above conversion. We are building another one from scratch and doing preliminary work on another conversion. It's a conversion, but we are going to re-write everything. The system is the biggest and oldest, some of the code is 30 years old with gotos and other horrible problems. If the whole group had to learn a new language, and then try and write these systems in that language; it'd take many years. We'd have years of dual systems, maintaining the old until the new was finished.
So if OO can add functionality without having to change old programs if we don't want to, well why not use it? I know I was skeptical when I first heard of it, but reading the new user's manual I saw functions I could be using now (already in the COBOL version I'm using) but didn't know they were part of the system. The desk reference I was using was two versions old.
Kevin T. - VRWC
Four hours sleep and a 50 mile bike ahead. At least it ain't raining like last weekend.
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