You find an adjusted for inflation piece of code at 2 cent per year.

Posted byB McGrawPosted inArticles

You find an interesting piece of code

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. SOCIAL-SECURITY-INCREASE.

DATA DIVISION.
WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
01 BASE-PAYMENT PIC 9(7)V99.
01 MULTIPLIER PIC 9V99 VALUE 1.00.
01 YEAR-COUNT PIC 9(2).
01 INCREASE-RATE PIC 9V99 VALUE 0.02.
01 FINAL-PAYMENT PIC 9(7)V99.

PROCEDURE DIVISION.
COMPUTE-PAYMENT.
DISPLAY "Enter the base payment amount: "
ACCEPT BASE-PAYMENT.
DISPLAY "Enter the number of years: "
ACCEPT YEAR-COUNT.
PERFORM VARYING YEAR-COUNT FROM 1 BY 1 UNTIL YEAR-COUNT > 37
    COMPUTE MULTIPLIER = MULTIPLIER + INCREASE-RATE
END-PERFORM.

COMPUTE FINAL-PAYMENT = BASE-PAYMENT * MULTIPLIER.
DISPLAY "Final Social Security Payment: " FINAL-PAYMENT.

STOP RUN.

After ChatGPT translating some code into python you discover that there’s an unexplained section of code here which appears to be adjusting the social security payments year after year by 0.02 for the last 37 years. Weird to adjust by a couple penny a year but multiplied by everyone receiving social security over time that can add up to a lot.

What do you do?

Comment out the code, it’s a quick win

Don’t say anything

Published by B McGraw

B McGraw has lived a long and successful professional life as a software developer and researcher. After completing his BS in spaghetti coding at the department of the dark arts at Cranberry Lemon in 2005 he wasted no time in getting a masters in debugging by print statement in 2008 and obtaining his PhD with research in screwing up repos on Github in 2014. That's when he could finally get paid. In 2018 B McGraw finally made the big step of defaulting on his student loans and began advancing his career by adding his name on other people's research papers after finding one grammatical mistake in the Peer Review process.

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