On 07/29/2015 11:28 AM, zMan wrote:
"Fairly decent" except for several major points of nonsense:
<SNIP>
"*But the even bigger reason not to rock the boat is the sheer size and
cost of replacing billions of lines of COBOL that exist today. Many of
these programs contain sensitive information about people, like social
security numbers, banking info, credit card info and healthcare records.*"
Sorry, no -- *programs* don't contain that data. Programs read/process
data. WTF.
<SNIPPAGE>
I have worked on COBOL programs written under DOS (as in
Mainframe), and who knows what the original O/S was in other
cases where the COBOL code had originally been written (including
NON-IBM systems).
Some of those programs had "hard coded" SSNs, CC account#s, etc.
However, I must confess, other than comments about the health (or
lack thereof) of certain people and their programming abilities
(or lack thereof), I've not seen healthcare records in source. I
have read some interesting comments in German when the rest of
the source was in English...
I have also worked on ALC, RPG, & RPGII on various systems where
similar data was also "hard coded" in the source.
So, yes, *programs* may well contain that data.
As far as I am [was] concerned they shouldn't have, but, they
did. And it was because of resource restrictions on/from the
original systems where developed.
Regards,
Steve Thompson
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