An application of compiler technology to the year 2000 problem

This paper describes our experience in developing techniques for repairing date affected programs using standard compiler technology. Starting with date‐ness information of certain variables based on their declarations, we propagate this information through all possible control paths, using date inference rules to traverse across individual statements. Our approach is fine grained enough to infer the date‐ness of each occurrence of a variable. After detecting date‐ness of variables, we renovate programs by applying a transformation using base year strategy. These techniques have been implemented as a tool set for renovating date affected COBOL programs. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.