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Comment Re:VistA is a nightmare (Score 1) 186

The one interesting thing here is that if you rewrite the execution environment, without creating a new language, you should be able to use the old code as tests for the functionality of your new code. You need some way to set up and tear down state for the snippets you're going to be executing, so the old execution environment that ran the system in production probably won't be suitable. Your best hope would probably be starting with a new "implementation" that can parse the code and either interpret it, or compile it, while recording the things that may be of interest to you (for example, if the old language was dynamic, and you need type information either for the purpose of documentation, or to generate static types for the new implementation, you can recover it by tracing).

You can't really use old code as a spec if you lack the necessary tools. Or, perhaps you could, but you'd be doing in your head what a computer should be able to do for you automatically. Expect working very long hours if you're so intent on doing a compiler's and code analyzer's work yourself. ;-)

Comment Re:VistA is a nightmare (Score 1) 186

He essentially suggested the use of automated techniques. From what I can tell, such automated techniques are being applied in practice. I recall a project that used a Smalltalk-based code analysis platform to refactor COBOL code. Are you saying that this approach doesn't save time and man-hours?

Comment Re:Trading one for the other (Score 1) 186

It's utterly useless for data integrity -- imagine a database where every field is a string. There are no numeric fields...and what happens? Oh.

Somehow I don't think a computer system should have a problem with this. Ultimately, in every computer system, every field in a database is an 8-bit string. On some kind of disk. ;) Actual lack of checks is what would give you problems.

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