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Imagine making even a minor change to the COBOL code. It's not likely to be very well structured or comprehensible. I'm guessing there would be a lot of global
by incompatible 7y ago
Imagine making even a minor change to the COBOL code. It's not likely to be very well structured or comprehensible. I'm guessing there would be a lot of global variables and strange database / file system interfaces. Very hard to do it without breaking something somewhere.
Edit: per the thread starting with vaidhy's comment.
- schmichael 7y agoJust yesterday there was an exciting post about printing off pages of assembly and reverse engineering archaic encryption using a crayon. If you thought that was exciting I can't imagine hacking on archaic COBOL codebase could be much worse in terms of quality of tooling! There's also a much better chance you'll have a say in the replacement if you work on and understand the original.
- DrScump 7y agoFun fact: the third-party dump formatting package we had in the 80s could show line by line what assembly code corresponded to each line of COBOL. I actually diagnosed a CAPEX optimizer bug that way once.
- boneitis 7y agoI couldn't track it down. Would you be able to relocate and link it? I'd love to see it, as someone who draws and colors all over printouts for reverse engineering challenges.
- celicaraptor 7y agoProbably this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22774057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22774057
- boneitis 7y agoOh! I should have known :) Thanks!