Greg Stigers wrote:

>Does anyone else handle their own scheduling without the benefit of third-party
>products? How do you handle holidays?
>
Our legacy code is using some very very old code that I originally wrote
in 1977 for date manipulation.  It was in IBM/360 Assembly.  It was
converted to SPL, and finally to SPLash!  It could take Gregorian dates
(yyyymmdd) and translate to a "Julian Base date" which is something I
made up that was a 32-bit value of the number of elapsed days since Jan
1, 1900.  It handled leap years remarkably well, even the odd 2000
case.  If you wanted to do date arithmetic, convert to Julian base and
compute away.  The value mod 7 would even give the day of week.  But
never tried to do anything with holidays.
We still use it as several systems adopted that date scheme; our legacy
[room] scheduling system kept reservations in Julian base format, and
could easily generate weekly repeating events, monthly, etc.

Now that COBOL has some more usable date functions, we're trying to move
new things into that format, but the legacy databases that store things
that way are still using the old code.  One of our Y2K booms was that we
were already (fortunately) storing dates as 32-bit integers (yyyymmdd)
or Julian base dates.  The only real Y2K issue was that our semesters
consisted of the academic year (last 2 digits) and the term suffix
(01=falll, 02=spring, etc) and it had it's own external SPL (now SPLash!
or C/iX) that went from 9907 to A001.  That was about the only
(fortunately) thing we had to do much work on (putting alphanumerics
where some programs expected digits).

Haven't played with holidays, but as most folks bring it up every year,
we do have a little job that does Daylight Savings Time changes.  And on
top of that, we are using XNTP.  Not as a server, but just to query
several campus time sources (routers) that do run full NTP.

Scheduling?  :STREAM;AT= or STREAM;IN= works for us, we don't have a
very hyperactive batch environment, almost all of those jobs are
services and independent of  each other.

Jeff

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