Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Tue, 1 Oct 2024 00:56:56 -0400
"186282@ud0s4.net" <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:

"AI" might come to the rescue here ... systems tuned to properly
understand old code (and their original hardware) and re-write in
something newer (if not greater).

"AI" (by the current definition of "a probabilistic word-salad
generator we're all pretending is 'intelligent,'" anyway) will never
understand this stuff better than even an incompetent human, because
"AI" doesn't *understand* anything at all. If COBOL programs were
*literally* nothing but the empty boilerplate they appear to be, "AI"
might be useful in maintaining them, but if we assume that they
actually do serve a meaningful function, it will be just as useless as
it is at everything else.

If we want a verbose know-nothing capable of being confidently wrong,
we've already *got* humans. And management.