Python and Industry, IBM I'm afraid

[D-Man]

On Thu, Jan 18, 2001 at 11:01:10AM +0100, Alex Martelli wrote:
| "D-Man" <dsh8290 at rit.edu> wrote in message
| news:mailman.979786609.2939.python-list at python.org...
|     [snip]
| > I have a part time job at a local grocery store that has a
| > video department.  The computer system they use is an IBM
| > mainframe with AIX (4 I think).  What is the language that the
| > software is most likely written in (earliest copyright on it
| > is late '80s, around the time the ANSI C standard was
| > published)?  COBOL or C (or some other language)?
| 
| Hard to say without more data, but, since AIX is and always
| was a Unix flavour, C is your most likely bet (but, of course,
| just about any language is available for Unix).
| 
| Late-'80s AIX was a VERY different (still Unix-flavoured)
| beast from the later AIX 4, and AFAIK it was not practically
[snip]

I checked again, the system is running AIX 4.2.  The terminals are
3515, but I don't think that helps much.

[snip]
| not really surprise me much:-).  As I recall, its main
| "here's our horrible surprise of the day for you" feature
| was a malloc that would never return 0 even if you asked
| it for FAR more memory than you had around -- rather, the
| program died horribly later when it actually tried to USE

Ugh!

| the memory it THOUGHT it had allocated... a "designed-in
| feature", they adamantly insisted, NOT a bug (later I
[snip]

People actually design a system to prevent proper error handling in
applications?  I'm glad I haven't had to develop on it (yet).


I had thought that it would be C, but I wasn't considering COBOL.
When someone mentioned the difficulty in finding a C compiler for
AS/400 systems (ok, I don't actually know what hardware this mainframe
is) I began to doubt my original assumption.

It's a horribly broken program anyways.  It can no longer calculate
the late fees correctly.  The company has the bad habit of changing
policy long /before/ changing the software.  Coupons almost never scan
at the correct value -- the value is usually dependent on what is
being purchased but the software uses a simple (maybe not) table
lookup so a single price is hard-"coded" in.  There is also a program
that if you rent a certain number of videos, you get a free rental.
The computer used to keep track of it.  When the updated the system to
allow expiration dates beyond 12/31/99 they broke the counter (this
was /before/ the New Year too!).  For a couple months the counter
would randomly count up, down, or stay the same.  Since then they have
reverted to punch cards the customer must keep track of.  I really
wish they would redesign the system to meet the current requirements!
(I imagine, and sincerely hope, that it met the requirements when it
was originally installed)

-D