Re: Motivation of software professionals

From:

Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org>

Newsgroups:

microsoft.public.dotnet.general,comp.lang.java.programmer,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.javascript

Date:

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:45:45 -0800

Message-ID:

<naWdnQH_AOkG9OjWnZ2dnUVZ_rWdnZ2d@earthlink.com>

Martin Gregorie wrote:
....

Until CODASYL changed the language spec, some time in the mid '90s, the
only way you could get the date from the OS was with the "ACCEPT CURRENT-
DATE FROM DATE." where CURRENT-DATE could only be defined as a six digit
field:

  01 CURRENT-DATE.
   05 CD-YY pic 99.
   05 CD-MM pic 99.
   05 CD-DD pic 99.

Punch cards were another major source of date information. They had
limited character sets, could not depend on elaborate preprocessing
before entry, and had a hard limit of 80 characters. Even if the input
record used a lot less than 80 characters, there was a strong motivation
to avoid wasting characters because of the complications if future
changes took a record over the limit.

I first became aware of the issue in 1970, and could not get any of my
fellow developers to pay any attention to it. They may have been right,
because the application I was working on was written in the NCR Century
assembly language, and was defunct long before 2000.

Patricia