"Gabor Szabo" schreef:
> {Cobol etc.]
> IMHO - and I really saw only a few such companies - these companies
> have 0 automatic tests so it would cost them a lot of time and money
> to test their application on the new and shiny Cobol compiler.
I once worked on tests for a national center of a bank, to monitor the
nightly runs of big money flowing. The Cobol programs ran on mainframes;
there were several IBM PCs, with character terminal emulation software,
connected to them.
On each PC there was a stack of C-programs, generated with yacc and lex.
When a fresh screen came up, a main program deducted the proper test for
it and ran it. When the test failed, the PC would start beeping and
flashing, to wake up the one operator that remained: this software
replaced a couple of people that once did the same tests with mental
arithmetic and a pocket calculator.
The terminal emulation software had a very raw INT-something-API (HLLAPI
IIRC), and IBM had updated the terminal emulation software but hadn't
updated the (never supported) linkable library layer for the API, so the
first thing I had to do was to create a replacement library. That took
only half a day, because the documentation of IBM was OK, and I could
generate much of the C-code with a few macros. I wondered why IBM hadn't
done that, it would have been a nice gesture.
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/H/HLLAPI.html
Next I had to check the test programs, because they failed often. These
were full of strdups without frees and things like that, they were made
by a Pascal programmer. It took me two days to fix all those yacc/lex
sources, throwing away about 90% of them because there was a lot of
duplication. Basically such a program would check the layout of the
screen, copy a few numbers from it and do some calculations on them,
then store the result in a log. And of course it would bark when things
didn't add up.
Monitoring, regular expressions, character based: nothing much has
changed.
http://search.cpan.org/~grommel/Convert-IBM390/IBM390.pod
http://search.cpan.org/~ingy/Inline/Inline-API.pod
"The Inline community will decide if your implementation of COBOL will
be distributed as the official Inline::COBOL or should use an alternate
namespace." :)
--
Affijn, Ruud
"Gewoon is een tijger."
