Re: Old broken COBOL programs from the 70s and 80s



"Richard" <riplin@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:c1a95ab0-6c62-465a-811c-c7086e358f1a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Jul 19, 5:38 pm, "Pete Dashwood"
<dashw...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"William M. Klein" <wmkl...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
messagenews:oJdgk.274415$I42.237813@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Another little COBOL time bomb that will explode in 42 years time :-)

Not if it has a sliding year.

The
MicroSoft one should explode about the same time, or, it WOULD do if
nobody
moved to 64 bit platforms. At least the MicroSoft one is automatically
remedied by moving to 64 bit hardware, without the need for intervention
in
program code...

You think ? What if the date were saved to file as a 32 bit integer ?

[Pete]

Anyone silly enough to do that deserves whatever they get... :-) You can
hardly blame MS for application design stupidity. They have done their part,
if the rest of us insist on using fields that are too small, that's hardly
their problem.

[/Pete]

Of course, by then none of us will be writing code anyway and "computer
programming" as we understand it will have the same relevance as lace
making
:-)

They said that in the 80s with 'The Last One' and even with LINK.

[Pete]

And in the ensuing 25 years huge progress has been made.

I haven't come across LINK (was that the Unisys package?) but did work on a
site where they evaluated "The Last One". It was decided not to pursue it.
There was also some general laughter when it was succeeeded by "The Next
One" some time later.

Nevertheless, it was a brave idea for the time. Most of us laugh at the old
flickers of early flying machines collapsing on or just after take-off, but,
without the failures, nothing would have been learned and we'd all still be
using ships to visit distant lands. The Wright Brothers machine did not fly
successfully the first time they tried it.

Personally, I don't believe computers will still be manually programmed by
the middle of this century. It is only the arrogance of Human Beings that
makes us think we are indispensable to such a process. It took us around 3
million years and opposable thumbs to get to where we are with thought
capacity and generalised problem solution capability. I believe we are
capable of designing a computer that could certainly do it in half a
century. Intense research is under way into deciphering the software of
brains and incredible progress is being made. IBM can now simulate a fully
functioning mouse brain; it was a step in our own evolution to move from
such as that to what we have now. (It took around 70 million years...)

Your scepticism, while based on valid past experience, does not take into
account the explosion of knowledge in general and the rapidly accellerating
rate of knowledge acquisition and learning. Ray Kurzweil (who DOES take
these things into account and actually documents the increase in the rate we
are going round the exponential curve) has 2048 as the date for his
'singularity'. At this point humans merge with computers and programming is
really irrelevant. We are then a combination of artifical and innate
intelligence connected by a network, which presents information on request,
just by thinking about it.

(There could only be learning and that would be at a rate we can't currently
imagine. It might be interesting to find that you just "know" stuff but have
no idea how you know it. (genetic and nano manipulations would provide it to
your consciousness on request). I don't know whether he's right about this
(he is right about a lot of things), and. maybe it will be a few hundred
years before that happens, but it is certainly unlikely that the primitive
way we currently use computers could continue on much after the middle of
this century.)

Have a look at "The Singularity is near" by Ray Kurzweil. It has a very good
bibliography and most of what is in it is not speculation. As a sometime
computer programmer he writes in a way that can be appreciated by most
people here.

Pete.
--
"I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything."




.

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