Despite the licensing issues mentioned in the press release, there seems
to be a type based competitor to the monad approach. Here is the brief
program description:
AnnoDomini is Hafnium's Year 2000 tool. AnnoDomini is developed for
IBM OS/VS COBOL and runs under Windows NT and Windows 95. AnnoDomini
is based on a novel polymorphic type theory, which we have developed
specifically for solving Year 2000 problems.
Whereas Lambdametrics openly advertises the use of monads, Hafnium have
decided to make their final product available to customers without
bothering them too much with the underlying technology. The product
comes with a graphical user interface and with a syntax-sensitive
program editor. Here is a longer excerpt from their press release, in
which they mention uniqueness and program analysis, but not the use of
type theory:
Unique Year 2000 find-and-fix tool developed by Danish researchers
By Abelone Glahn
Six researchers from the Department of Computer Science at the University of
Copenhagen have developed a Year 2000 tool which not only finds and analyzes
Year 2000 problems in COBOL programs, but which also proposes corrective
actions and executes them on the COBOL programs.
The application, AnnoDomini, is developed for OS/VS COBOL programs and runs as
a PC application under Windows NT and Windows 95. It is intended for large
companies, e.g. banks and insurance companies, which require a high degree of
confidence that all problems have been located and solved before the new
millennium.
The six researchers, who have formed a company, Hafnium ApS, have just signed a
contract with Computer Generated Solutions, Inc. which is now exclusive,
worldwide remarketer of AnnoDomini.
-We wanted to show Danish industry that there is a great deal of free
technology that they could benefit from, if they were a little more interested
in research, says Mads Tofte, associate professor and Ph.D. -If we could
develop a Year 2000 tool faster than our competitors, then we would have a
strong case for the technology we work with every day and which Danish industry
so far has not been particularly interested in.
Mads Tofte and his colleagues at Hafnium not only completed the development in
one and a half year, but were also able to convince leading experts in the US
that they were on to something remarkable. -Out of 130 Year 2000 projects IBM
pointed to our product for futher development, and today AnnoDomini is sold
through the IBM business partner Computer Generated Solutions, Inc.
AnnoDomini is a tool for transforming OS/VS COBOL programs, a tool which is
easy to use and which does not miss errors, provided it is used correctly.
-Most Year 2000 tools can search through the program text and look for names in
the program that appear to denote years. Names such as "YEAR" of "DATE" suggest
that something needs to be fixed. But this is a somewhat unsafe method, because
there are data records in a program whose names do not reveal that they, in
fact, denote years, says Mads Tofte. -This is where AnnoDomini (and IBM's
Millennium Language Extensions) make a difference. They analyze the part of the
COBOL program which moves data around and which executes calculations, and
based on this analysis, safe conclusions can be drawn as to whether data
records contain years.
A unique feature of AnnoDomini is that once the COBOL program is analyzed and
the relevant years have been located, AnnoDomini can automatically convert the
program to become year 2000 compliant. In cases where there is no unique
solution, AnnoDomini makes a number of suggestions concerning how to resolve
the situation and prompts the user for a choice instead of "guessing". Once the
user has answered the questions from AnnoDomomi, the system performs the
changes and checks that the new program is Year 2000 ready.
The six researchers are Mads Tofte, associate professor and Ph.D., Fritz
Henglein, associate professor and Ph.D., Morten Heine B. Soerensen, assistant
professor and Ph.D., Christian Mossin, software engineer and Ph.D., Henning
Niss, Ph.D. student, and Peter Harry Eidorff, IT consultant and holder of a
degree in business administration.
-Denmark has outstanding potential for becoming an important software
developing nation, Mads Tofte reports. -Denmark is a respected country with a
solid reputation and we have an incredible amount of good research in Computer
Science. -It is a terrible waste that so much of this research is never applied
in Denmark. Apparently, we prefer to buy off-the-shelf solutions from abroad,
although the country has the knowledge it takes to develop first-rate
solutions.
