Ron Johnson wrote:
On 11/10/08 05:38, Napoleon wrote:
Ron Johnson wrote:
On 11/09/08 17:53, Napoleon wrote:
Ron Johnson wrote:
On 11/09/08 06:58, Mark Allums wrote:
Ron Johnson wrote:
On 11/08/08 23:25, Mark Allums wrote:
[snip]
But, would you want a render farm made up of SGI workstations
from the
1990s? The state of the art is still moving pretty fast. Even for
mainframes, the shelf-life of what is generally considered
useful for a
lot of applications is less than 6 years.
Unless:
(a) your workload growth is relatively static, or
(b) you purchased excess capacity and are growing into it.
An important reason, though, why many mainframe shops upgrade is
that the cost of maintenance contracts skyrocket after 4ish
years, so that it's cheaper to buy a new machine than to maintain
the old one.
True. But the software running on the thing is 45
year-old-COBOL. :)
Possibly the same binaries!
In a similar vein: contrary to Unix lore, most C apps are horribly
non-portable, whereas COBOL apps are *very* portable.
Contrary to popular lore, COBOL apps are typically no more portable
than C apps.
For more than a decade, small-systems COBOL vendors have made
compilers that compile and run VSII/CICS/DB2 apps on both *ix and
Windows.
And for more than 40 years, mainframe COBOL vendors have made
compliers that compile and run apps on DOS and MVS systems.
That does not make them portable.
Sure it does, if other vendors' compilers successfully compile the code
on Windows and *ix.
That's a mighty big IF.
And you can also say the same for C, FORTRAN or any other compiled language.
ANSI C code can be portable at the source code level. So can ANSI
COBOL or virtually any other code conforming to ANSI standards. But
very little of it does because the ANSI standards are quite limiting.
For that reason, most compilers have their own extensions to the
language.
Binaries are NEVER portable across different platforms (CPU and OS
family). Pseudo-code like that generated by the Java and Smalltalk
compilers is can be run on any system with the proper interpreter.
But compiled languages must be compiled for each platform. And if you
need to use different compilers, you need to stick to ANSI standards
(and all of their limitations).
I presumed that you were bright enough to realize that *of course* I was
referring to source code portability... Only a raving idiot would think
that you could take an MVS/OS binary and run it on a Windows or *ix box
on a completely different CPU architecture (Hercules emulator not
withstanding).
Maybe I overestimated your intelligence.
I understood what you said. But you don't understand the just because a
program is written in COBOL doesn't mean it's very transportable. That
is patently NOT true. It wasn't true when I had to deal with COBOL over
30 years ago, and has only gotten worse.
I guess I overestimated YOUR intelligence.
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
