Debbie Blumenthal <[log in to unmask]> and Therm-O-Link
<[log in to unmask]> argue that internally dates should be
stored as eight digits with the full century (e.g., ccyymmdd).  I
couldn't agree more.  However, most applications have to deal with
three dates:
 
1.  The input format for dates from the user.
 
2.  The internal storage of the date.
 
3. The output format that users expect.  This may vary depending on
   the amount of output room (e.g., Windows International
   configuration has a short and long format for dates).
 
At HP World, we had a session with over 50 Suprtool users.  We were
trying to determine what Suprtool should do for point #1 above (i.e.,
the input date format).  Among the users, there was no one who was
going to leave their internal date format as YYMMDD (Suprtool supports
several different internal date formats).
 
As Debbie pointed out, some fields (e.g., birth-date) should probably
have no assumed century in the input format.  But there might be other
fields where this makes sense.  The 50 or so Suprtool users certainly
could not agree on what even the default should be in Suprtool, but
most did want some kind of cut-off date for assuming the century for
input dates.  A few wanted a configuration option that forced the
century to be specified on all input dates.
 
Hope this makes it clearer what I was talking about.
 
Cheers,
 
David     <[log in to unmask]>