Jeff:

I've got the sneakin' suspicion that at some point, they'll change the
CALENDER intrinsic to indicate the number of years and days since 2000
instead of 1900.

Tom Madigan
SE Pennsylvania

"My opinions are strictly my own.  Who else would want 'em?"

At 02:09 AM 4/27/99 -0500, Jeff Woods wrote:

        [snip]

>Apparently, SHOWTIME still uses the CALENDAR intrinsic date format, which
uses
>a 16 bit structure to encode "years since 1900" and "days into the year" in 9
>and 7 bits respectively.  Because the year is stored in 9 bits, the largest
>value it can represent is 127 years after 1900...  or 2027.   HP has
introduced
>HPCALENDAR which returns the date in a 32 bit structure which doesn't have
this
>limitation.  If MPE is still around in another 25 years (in some form or
>another I expect it will be ;) I'm sure that HP will totally obsolete the
>CALENDAR intrinsic to force applications which depend on it to fail, as they
>can't work correctly after 2027.  On the other hand, perhaps someone will
come
>up with some creative way to preserve the backward compatibility and enable
>applications that use it to still correctly.  But for at least the next 20
>years, I don't think it's a high priority.  Of course, new date
calculations in
>programs should be implemented with HPCALENDAR and other tools that don't
have
>such restrictions, but there are a lot of applications that will continue to
>work just fine for another couple of decades with the old structure, and that
>seems sufficient to me.
>--
>Jeff Woods
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>