[Info-vax] Any stronger versions of the LMF planned ?, was: Re: LMF Licence Generator Code

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Thursday, August 19, 2021 at 6:49:24 AM UTC+12, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> The COBOL code is more lines. For one reason: everything need to be 
> declared with a type. You may not like that, but I think that the 
> COBOL programmers like that.

And it’s worse than that. COBOL’s fixed-length strings open up a whole new potential avenue of vulnerabilities, in the form of buffer-overflow attacks.

Another thing Fred Brooks said had to do with software systems that became so large and so complex that attempts to fix bugs would only introduce new ones. You managed to reach that point in just about a dozen lines of COBOL.