Re:The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java
by FigBug on Wednesday February 14, 2018 @01:33PM
(#16378050)
Yes, manually. I missed that distinction, building the tool could be fun, but verifying it works would be a huge pain. Shouldn't be too hard to write test cases for tax code.
Re:The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java
by theptip on Wednesday February 14, 2018 @05:26PM
(#16380084)
> Shouldn't be too hard to write test cases for tax code.
I would disagree here -- like timezones, tax software has the disadvantage of being both extremely boring, and very fiddly (thus requiring close attention). This combination makes it very hard to maintain the concentration that's required to write exhaustive tests.
But, my understanding is that the bulk of the work done in this case was done by a conversion tool that was designed and developed by a group of 8 people led by the gentleman referred to in the article (Jian Wang). The conversion tool project was the work that I was referring to in my comment.