Pete - I'm moving our apps slowly and gradually to C#, based primarily on
some
things you've said in the past in this forum. These days I don't know just
what to
recommend to management. Our core apps are screen driven COBOL from the
seventies,
which have been converted and migrated across six different platforms over
the past
three decades. Formerly I had been a strong proponent of COBOL for
precisely that
reason... relative hardware independence. Moving to another system
involved
modifying screen behavior and some minor differences in file system
hosting (i.e,
the behavior of ISAM on whatever database system upon which it is
implemented).
Never simple but always do-able.
Consequently, the core algorithms - the processing guts - could remain
untouched,
except where needed in order to accommodate changing business needs. The
rest of the
code however has been adulterated with kludge upon kludge to make it fit
whatever
platform we happened to be running on for the time being. Our most recent
conversion
was to SQL server using ADO with some help from you and Frederico. But
whether or
not Microsoft will be the platform of choice another decade from now is
not certain.
Same can be said for C#. So I'm not entirely sold.
Note that what the programs actually do hasn't changed. Not that a rewrite
hasn't
been tried before. Earlier this decade, I was canned and another team
brought in to
rewrite the most important apps in a more "modern" language (read VB).
Disastrous.
Just seeing the results of someone's attempt to write a bill of materials
explosion,
which is essentially a mere training exercise when done in COBOL with ISAM
- using
in-memory tables and bubble sorts is almost humorous.
Now I'm back in, and they're asking me what to do. Unfortunately I can no
longer
recommend COBOL. Not because it can't do the job, but because it's
becoming less and
less likely to remain viable. It sounds to me like your approach is yet
another stop
gap approach... essentially the same thing we've been doing for the past
30 years.
Good luck in your endeavor. I can see where this would be a handy short
term
solution for those with large volumes of code. We've already been there
and done it.
Not using your technique, but with the same result.
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