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

From: Doug Scott (dwscott_at_ieee.org)
Date: 01/02/04 

Date: Fri, 02 Jan 2004 11:52:06 GMT

Peter,

> Moving numbers between the Bank and your employees is something Banks have
> dealt with for many years now. In Europe it is called BACS...

And it's done using batch processing! Generating a serial file for
transmission to BACS is not a real time function.

> The only time I ever encountered
> this was in control of an oil refinery; the application of it to Business is
> improbable, but, even if it were, the same techniques would solve the
> problem.

I wrote a program twenty years ago to address this precise problem, and it
cannot have been unique at all in the financial industries. It is to do with
reinsurance, where hundreds of companies shared in a bunch of risks (e.g Piper
Alpha). Each had a percentage share of the premium income and claims
expenditure, and the net premium income had to be distributed according to
share amongst these companies. Some may only have 1% of the contract, some
might have as much as 8.3333%. The revenue split had to be precise, and it all
had to add up to the total revenue from the contract. And you couldn't have
two reinsurers chatting over a glass at some stage, discovering that although
they held the same percentage share, their revenue was different. That
requires dealing with rounding errors, without sampling and with a tolerance
of £0.01.

It's not difficult, but it is a significant business problem. 

---
Doug
dwscott@ieee.org