[fpc-devel] Episode 4. Addressing and it's limits Part Two

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

steve smithers wrote:

>> iron", since it has always seemed clear to me that that type of kit has 
>> its uses: if nothing else then to do things like running the name and 
>> certificate servers that keep distributed systems going. It's also worth 

 > You might not intend to belittle big-iron, but it is statements such
 > as this that do just that.  There are millions lines of mainframe code
 > out there written in Cobol or Fortran or, yes, even Assembler that
 > continue to form the backbone of production systems of most of the big
 > banks and financial institions, cashpoint networks, supermarket admin
 > systems, travel companies, sales and administration systems and a host
 > of others.  Not to mention the government!

I'm afraid that you're missing my point, which is that devotees of PCs 
(and before that of minis) would argue that all the examples you give 
above could "easily" be moved away from mainframes onto their favoured 
platform. In some cases they might be right- provided that you are 
prepared to ignore the cost and difficulty of doing the port and testing 
the result. In others, such as the examples I gave, it is quite simply 
not possible: some sort of centralised system is mandated by what you're 
trying to do. So my examples were not trying to belittle the platform, 
but were intended to be cases that the PC brigade quite simply couldn't 
argue against.

Now let's stop arguing at cross purposes about whether the platform is 
still used and what governs things like character set selection, and get 
on with trying to work out how to do the job.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]