Re: Question: How will the Year 2000 bug impact your work?

In article <55v2a0$ohd@romeo.logica.co.uk> gregorie@see.sig.for.address (Martin Gregorie) writes: >>I have had several preliminary meetings with prospective clients who have serious >>Y2K problems, most of them on mainframes running COBOL or RPG apps. So far all my >>analyses indicate that it would be far less expensive to re-write the entire apps >>in a modern 4GL like Progress and run the app in a modern client-server >>environment, than to try to fix the present code. Few of the apps really require a >>mainframe, although in those few cases the mainframe could continue to be used as >>a data server. >I'd agree but for one small point. >Many sites have out of date documentation if they haven't lost it >entirely, and often have no written record of changes since the system >was implemented. As a result a rewrite would first involve >recreating/updating the spec from the code and *this* is can be >sufficiently expensive to make the rewrite quite unattractive. Okay, let's say that the client is American Express and the program in question is a COBOL application that processes several hundred thousand transactions an hour from all over the globe and it's working fine but we're worried about the Year-2000 date-handling and ... and your "solution" is to do what?!?! I don't know where your analysis came from, friend, but I'm afraid it smacks of "this is what I'm in business to do and I want to persuade you that I'm an authority so you'll agree that what I'm in business to do is what you need... or at least I have this report to sell you." Sorry, but that's exactly how it reads.