Re: (not entirely...) OT: OPINION... chicken entrails, runic stones, and crystal balls... WAS CoBOL moved to OO

From: Judson McClendon (judmc_at_sunvaley0.com)
Date: 01/01/04 

Date: Thu, 01 Jan 2004 22:22:30 GMT

"Doug Scott" <dwscott@ieee.org> wrote:
> Judson,
>
> > It would be interesting to learn how you see
> > these in a 'no batch' scenario. :-)
>
> I did a lot of work on this. You can do most updates in real time, but
> reporting is by its very nature a batch process.

Real time updates for most things, maybe, but probably not payroll. You
have to know the totals before you can calculate the details. And all the
checks will probably need to be printed at the same time.

Even when things can be done real time you may not want to, because it
complicates the rounding error problem, for example. For those of you
not familiar, you can get very different results by rounding each of
100,000 transactions then summing them, as opposed to summing
100,000 transactions then rounding once. You can mitigate this in some,
but not all, situations by using more decimal places at certain levels.

I guess you could say that some things process incrementally, and those
can be done completely real time. But there are other things that process
in some larger quantum, and those may not suitable for real time
processing, at least completely. 

-- 
Judson McClendon      judmc@sunvaley0.com (remove zero)
Sun Valley Systems     http://sunvaley.com
"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that
whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."