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A comment on AmEx: "We discourage the use of special characters because...". Parent comment

Re:AmEx: "We discourage the use of special characters becaus... by thaumaturgy on Sunday February 07, 2010 @09:46PM (#1108758)
It's COBOL, isn't it? (Not being sarcastic; that's the only system I can think of that would cost 7 figures to change a field length in the database.)
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Re:AmEx: "We discourage the use of special characters becaus... by ShabbyDoo on Sunday February 07, 2010 @10:08PM (#1108794)
At a past job, the mainframe "copybooks" required an extra digit for certain price fields (cars never used to cost > 100K). It was a months-long project which required tons of coordination with other clients systems. One could argue that the 27 other ways the company didn't have its house in order made the project costly, but the 30+ hour flatfile data conversion was an inherent part of the plan.

Edit: Legacy COBOL, of course.

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