Data *and* code (Score 2)

This is actually a topic close to home for me. I've had to work both with archival data and legacy code for several years now. Recovering and transferring data from real-live systems isn't always trivial. A few years ago, I recovered some data from my advisor's old IBM workstation. It had a hard disk and several floppies full of EBCDIC data. It took me a few weeks of phone calls to networking support before I discovered the wonderful "dd" command on my own (no flames about taking two weeks, I'm an astronomer, not a CS major). Another example is when existing machines migrate to new operating systems. A big recent headache for me was getting Cray CTSS data migrated to UNICOS ASCII data. I think the key in instances like that is to make sure that old data standards are well known and easily translatable.

Now, I'm dealing with legacy code, too. One solution of course is to write vanilla code in a common language, but who knows what language is going to be used in 25 years? C+++? Fortran 2020? And vanilla code isn't always optimal, when hardware vendors build cutesy hotrodding tricks into their architecture and compilers.

Somebody just needs to build a giant computer version of babelfish for all languages ever. Starting with cave paintings. :)