Well, if it's a mission critical system with millions of lines of code that need inspecting by highly trained engineers, I don't think that's so far fetched. So

Well, if it's a mission critical system with millions of lines of code that need inspecting by highly trained engineers, I don't think that's so far fetched. Some Y2K problems might require significant refactoring. Then pile on code auditing & certification before it can go back into production systems. There were some comments here just a few days ago about NASA software: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2736107 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2736107