> Do people learn nothing from their past mistakes? I kinda feel you've never worked with a large code base or database that has a legacy going back 25+ years.

> Do people learn nothing from their past mistakes? I kinda feel you've never worked with a large code base or database that has a legacy going back 25+ years...older than many of the commentators on this thread. Not all of the data types used might have been obvious in their "danger", especially in ancient code. Sure you could run some analysis over the code, but can that analyser determine from a #def or variable name the true intent of the value being stored? I wrote an application for a customer in 1986, and stone me, they were still running it in a DOSBOX emulator in 2004. Lucky for me dates weren't important.