Digital Equipment Corporation has announced that it is shipping the first Digital version of the Piercom 2000 tool, which automates much of the work needed to make customer application programmes Year 2000 ready. The release of this tool as a Digital product reflects the company`s commitment to addressing all aspects of Year 2000 readiness, including hardware and software warranties, tools, services and resource centres to help customers. The Piercom 2000 Digital Version is specially tailored for Digital`s operating systems and programming languages. The COBOL version is available now, with other language versions following in the next few months. Piercom 2000 Digital Version automates much of the code assessment and remediation, or code correction, phases of customers` Year 2000 readiness projects. Piercom 2000 has a highly effective parser that enables customers to track down dates through complex and obscure chains of references. This helps them remediate our applications software quickly, with a high degree of confidence. "Users are enthusiastic about the incorporation of a Web browser in the tool," says Simon Griffiths, alliance manager at Digital Equipment Corporation SA. "They really like the way it lets them cruise through the code, saving considerable time. The tool`s use of colour to highlight date data makes it much less likely that something important will be overlooked. The familiar Web interface also means that users can be proficient with Piercom 2000 almost from the start. We expect that the short learning curve will also reduce personnel requirements considerably, and produce a significant cost saving." Griffiths adds that the Piercom 2000 tool will help Digital`s customers attain readiness faster. "It adds to the growing list of Year 2000 productivity tools that Digital Services offers for each phase of Year 2000 readiness work. Our Year 2000 service professionals, operating out of special centres worldwide, can help customers choose the best course of action to attain readiness as quickly and efficiently as possible." Digital customers can contract with Digital or its partners for Year 2000 service plans, which may include use of the Piercom tool. Digital customers can also purchase a license for the Piercom 2000 Digital Version directly from Digital or from Digital`s partners. An unlimited-use license is also available. The tool is available in both assessment-only and assessment and remediation licenses. Pricing depends on the number of the lines of code to be used with the programme. The Piercom 2000 tool works by parsing the application programme`s source code, just like a compiler does, and recommending change scenarios, much like a spell checker identifies misspelled words and recommends corrections. It then converts the section of code and displays the results in a user-friendly format. In all cases, Piercom 2000 advises the programmer of the changes to be made, and he or she accepts or revises the date change strategy. Once the corrections are complete, Piercom 2000 can generate new source code that implements either a windowing or date expansion solution to the detected Year 2000 problems. Piercom 2000 Digital Version runs under Digital UNIX on Digital AlphaServer platforms. The tool handles both OpenVMS and Digital UNIX extensions to the COBOL language. For additional information on Digital`s Year 2000 programmes, visit Digital`s Year 2000 Web site at http://www.digital.com/year2000.
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