Re: COBOL Compiler for Windows

In article <6809kaF2qgkhnU1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Pete Dashwood <dashwood@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>
>"James J. Gavan" <jgavandeletethis@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message 
>news:RewSj.107364$rd2.67172@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> Some years back I did read where software had been written to recognise

>> Chinese characters and that Microsoft was interested. So in due course
of 
>> time if there's an enhanced OCR, which can read the Rosetta Stone then 
>> banks wont be faced with the manual intervention of keying in MICR. 
>> Nonetheless, however the cheques are encoded you are still left with a 
>> bunch of cheques = BATCH !
>>
>OK, my point was that batch processing will become redundant (largely 
>because the processing cycles it consumes will be available in parallel
and 
>real time, so they can be applied at the time the transaction occurs,
using 
>distributed parallel processors (which looks like being the next "big
thing" 
>to hit IT, and will change some of the ways we look at programming...))
>
>Taking your example of the Bank above, I hope you would agree that if 
>cheques are eliminated, so is that particular problem.

Mr Dashwood, I am not certain of the various legal requirement about when 
and how an institution is required to supply an authority (individual or 
governmental) with a statement of account(s)... but no, eliminating 
checks/cheques does not eliminate a bank's responsibility to be able to 
generate a list of transactions for an account or range of accounts over a

given period of time.

Given the example above... eliminating the physical, negotiable 
instruments knows as cheques/checks in no wise eliminates the need or 
desireability of an organisation to know the state of its accounts, 
inventory, personnel activity or other phenomena segregated discretely 
over time.

To see everything as discrete transactions ignores the possibility of 
trend analysis... this was one of the reasons, e'er-so-long ago, that 
information was weighted against cost-of-production and some stuff deemed 
worthy of weekly re****ts... and other of monthly... and others quarterly, 
semi-annually, annually, biennially, etc.  Yes, sometime In The Future 
hardware will be such that data organised for an OnLine Transaction 
Processing system can be used for data-mining... but not just yet... and 
until hardware becomes such, data will have to be manipulated from the 
OLTP-entry state to a summarisable state with little or no operator 
interaction.

DD