
Re: C is the new COBOL
"You do not want chainsaw-juggling gift-sets sold for family Christmas presents."
Why not ?
It would solve the housing shortage.
188 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Apr 2020
"what is the improved waiting in the wings replacement for COBOL"
I have no love for Cobol (I worked with it for too long), but I do not know of any modern language that does what Cobol does - and does well.
Yes, I know it's verbose, clunky, has over 1k reserved words, has no real standard ....
It depends on the jurisdiction. IANAL but as I understand it in the UK a limited company protects the directors and shareholders from financial liability, but not liability for dodgy behaviour. In France I believe it is the other way around. In NL, I dunno.
But which dialects of Fortran or Cobol? One estimate put the number of possible *standard* Cobol dialects at over 100000, even without implementor defined features.
Then you have to take into account changes in the way that the language interacts with its environment: character encoding, buffering, disk file format, system calls, in Cobol f'rinstance how does one mark a deleted record ...
Migration aint easy - even if one does not have to do it in a rubber dinghy
"why would you install works stuff to your own equipment!?!?"
Regardless of the current discussion about out of hours calls, you should always keep clear water between your work equipment and accounts, and your personal stuff. If you don't, you open yourself up to accusations of unauthorised access and other naughty things.
So, no dual SIM phones; always two separate devices. Ensure everything is air-gapped.
Me, paranoid? You should see my collection of T-shirts.
At the time that UK MoD were mandating Ada, a friend was in charge of software procurement for the Royal Navy. He asked me one day, what questions he should ask the Ada "experts" who are bidding for RN contracts. I told him: ask them what language they use to write their in-house accounting software.
Many moons ago, before my beard was grey, the UK MoD insisted that everything had to be written in Coral66* and not in assembler. The software providers responded by providing programs in the form:
begin code;
... assembly language program ...
end code;
What goes around comes around.
*Anyone else remember Coral66 and the Pink Peril (the language 'spec' - it had more holes than a fishing net)?
"US style fast food outlets started pushing the coffee and looked at you funny if you asked for tea"
My experience is that they cannot actually make tea as they do not have any means of boiling water. The hottest they have is about 95C, not nearly hot enough for tea. When I tried to argue the toss at a local Starbucks, the answer I got was that they have to follow rules set by head office, and those rules do not permit them to have boiling water. Go figure.
A local hotel is prepared to put a jug of water in the microwave*, so at least their teas has some flavour.
* I can feel from here the shudders of certain folks at the thought of making tea in a microwave.
"Apparently display + knob + buttons on a top end microwave is cheaper than just the 2 knobs (time and power) on basic microwave."
When I recently had to replace my microwave I went for the professional/commercial market. I got just what I wanted, entirely electro-mechanical controls, and at a lower price than anything that the shops were offering. Try f'rinstance https://www.nisbets.co.uk/
""Or you could just take it to your local dump ("household waste recycling centre")"
You are out of date with your terminology. It is now an "Amenity Centre".
But try getting a 5ft double mattress into a small car. It would be easier getting t[w]o W[h]ales in a Mini.
" If it's going to be fixed, fix it at GMT+1 all year round."
We tried that for a few years in the 70s(?). You have to remember that Edinburgh is west of Bristol, so all the inhabitants of our frozen northern wastes* are way out, even on GMT. On BST they are totally out of sight.
* Awaiting rude gestures from Scottish readers.
"Lights will go on and off at various times. "
I've been using plug-in electro-mechanical switches for over 50 years. Cheap as chips, and they last for decades. Remember; "state of the art" really means tried and tested, not brand new and flaky.
Smart? Bah! Humbug! (It's nearly that time of year)
"'to clearly not misunderstand' is an egregiously split infinitive"
Split infinitives are only a venial sin in English. See Fowler's Modern English Usage (Gowers edition, not Burchfield, which IMO is useless). The real fault is that the adverb should normally come after the verb or adjective it modifies. But there are exceptions: "only" can come almost anywhere in a sentence. In all other cases in English the modifier come before the head item that it modifies: preposition-noun, subject-verb, adjective-noun.
Other languages have different patterns. I believe that Hungarian is strictly postfix.
</grammar nazism>
"I have searched for a word that refers to itself."
In a logic text book I once read the word is "homologous". "Heterologous" denotes a word that does not refer to itself. Clearly, there are no other possibilities.
"Short" is a short word, and so is homologous; "long" is not a long word and so is heterologous. But what about "Heterologous" itself? If "heterologous" is heterologous then it does not refer to itself and so must be homologous. But if it is homologous then it does refer to itself and so is heterologous.