Strange that you posted this just today. We just had a similar problem. A program has been in production for _years_. It had a "hard coded" limit of 200 on some table. Friday night, it abended with a "table sized exceeded" message for the first time in history. I guess the original programmer was a least somewhat paranoid and actually checked. Anyway, no programmers were immediately available (out to dinner, at baseball game, ...), mainly because the z/OS system is moribund and management keeps firing them "to save money". Thank God, it was in Model Office and not Production. Of course, the production control person was hyper because "does this mean that production is going down tonight?????!!!!???? Where is somebody to look and fix it!!!". I don't _do_ COBOL. Well, actually, I can. But I tend to just blow over the Endevor change control system because I don't know how to use it.
On Sat, Sep 20, 2014 at 2:04 PM, Ed Gould <[email protected]> wrote: > Found this and thought it would be interesting for the group: > ----------------------------------------- > This big retail chain wants to make sure it doesn't feed duplicate orders > into a mainframe system, so it tasks a Cobol programmer with making sure > that doesn't happen, reports a pilot fish in the know. > > "This was 1992," fish says. "The program would check for a duplicate order > based on the order numbers stored in a table. There was a subscript just > after the table that was used to step through the table to compare all the > values. > > "Unfortunately, he forgot to put a check in place to abort the process if > the table got full. > > "I had always heard that the worst bugs are found within six months after a > program is put into production, and have lived with this notion secure in my > mind. > > "In 2014, my buddy who still works there told me that the program ordinarily > took a few minutes to run, but one day it ran for two hours. They canceled > it and quickly found this bug. > > "So much for the six month rule." > > -------------------------------------- > > > > http://www.computerworld.com/article/2682606/on-the-other-hand-it-survived-y2k-just-fine.html?source=CTWNLE_nlt_shark_2014-09-18#tk.rss_sharktank > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN -- There is nothing more pleasant than traveling and meeting new people! Genghis Khan Maranatha! <>< John McKown ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
