Conference turris::languages

188.0. "A languages war story" by COMICS::DEMORGAN (Richard De Morgan, UK CSC/CS) Fri Jun 10 1988 10:22

    Here is a languages war story - it happened yesterday.
    
    I was called out to a site in a foreign country. A major bank had
    a dealing room system written in C by a third party vendor. No names
    to protect the guilty. On top of this, they were writing PL/I to
    add bells and whistles to the system. All of a sudden, they discovered
    that data generated by the system, stored for some unaccountable
    reason in global sections (what if the system falls over?) was getting
    corrupted - their records were being overwritten, in a few places,
    by garbage characters. The bug was theirs - they were calling a
    C routine from a PL/I routine, passing as a parameter an action
    routine within the PL/I routine which (have you guessed it?) up-level
    addressed non-static variables within the PL/I routine.
    
    What really got me was that these wallies had no project control
    over their programming, and incorporated new code into a live dealing
    room situation where millions of pounds were being transferred all
    over the place ... then they scream at us because they think it's
    our bug - the latest version of the PL/I compiler issues warning
    messages about passing routines with up-level references, as
    parameters, and the linker also issues a warning message.

> the latest version of the PL/I compiler issues warning
> messages about passing routines with up-level references, as
> parameters, and the linker also issues a warning message.

I'm glad we made the decision to add that message for PL/I V3.  It's good to
see that it's paying off.