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: 01/03/04 

Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2004 13:23:08 GMT

Peter,

> It just needs imagination.

By its very nature, payroll is time-synchronised. Real time or
interactive transactions are relevant where people work in different
cost centres within a payroll period, so that part of it can be
interactive. But the employee is paid weekly, or monthly or whatever.
That then becomes a batch process, because no further human interaction
is required to produce the results - just a tick of the clock.

Similarly, share dividends are declared and paid annually, quarterly or
whatever time period they decide. Once the dividend allocation is
declared (a single transaction), millions of payments can be
originated. Doing that via a real-time interactive system would
probably dim the lights, but have no other effect on the result. Do it
in batch background, and let the users get better response times. 

---
Doug
dwscott@ieee.org