The first application that I supported on an HP3000, back in the very early
80's, dealt with 'tracking' secret documents.  Each document had an expiration
date and for many of them would be beyond the year 2000.  The convention that we
established was this same 'A0' format.   The original developer had this long
series of 'if' statements all over the place translating the date between its
storage and display format.  When I joined the team one of the first tasks was
to write a central general purpose routine that did the conversions.

I wonder if we should have tried to patent the idea back then.

Regards
Paul Christidis





this solution appeared to require more actual code work that fixing the programs
and expanding the data.  If expanding the data was the problem, both Adager and
DBGeneral had options to do this, and my experience was that it worked great.  I
guess the limiting factor was getting the clients to run the data transformation
process.  the new HP date intrinsics at least made it less painful to do date
math and such with these types of dates.


Tracy Pierce <[log in to unmask]> on 01/05/2000 12:08:46 PM

Please respond to Tracy Pierce <[log in to unmask]>

 To:      [log in to unmask]

 cc:      (bcc: Shawn Gordon/IS/FHM/FHS)

 Subject: Re: Y2K and Sorted YYMMDD Image paths!



I vote for *KLUDGE*.  I wonder if they did this because disk is too expensive to
expand to 8-digit dates?

Tracy Pierce,
Golden Gate Bridge

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ted Ashton [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2000 11:23 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Y2K and Sorted YYMMDD Image paths!
>
>
> Thus it was written in the epistle of Glenn J. Koster, Sr.,
> > Tom wrote:
> >
> > > Growthpower uses a nasty Kludge for Sorted Dates. 991231
> is followed by
> > > A00101. Jan 2000 thru Dec 2009 is A00101 to A91231. Jan
> 2010 thru Dec
> > > 2019 is B00101 to B91231. And so on.
> >
> > I beg to differ, I don't feel that the "A0" formatted date
> is a "nasty
> > Kludge".  In fact, it is a worthy candidate for most
> ingenious Y2K success
> > stories not requiring date windowing.
>
> Would you settle for "nice kludge"? ;-).
>
> Ted
> --
> Ted Ashton ([log in to unmask]), Info Serv, Southern
> Adventist University
>           ==========================================================
> Whoever despises the high wisdom of mathematics nourishes himself on
> delusion and will never still the sophistic sciences whose
> only product is
> an eternal uproar.
>                         -- da Vinci, Leonardo (1452-1519)
>