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Wirt Atmar wrote :
<snip>
>The vast majority of the major applications in existence on the HP3000 use
>text field dates. Moreover, I have come to strongly believe that only the
>poorly designed databases use numeric fields to store dates.
 
>If the character position of a numerical digit has even the remotest
>possiblity of meaning something to someone, it is not merely a mistake to
>store that number as a numeric field dataitem, it is a sin against God, man,
>nature, machine and beast.
<snip>
 
While I agree with Wirt in principle, I have recently found it necessary to
modify
a database I designed to use the Powerhouse date format (numerical) rather
than the normal text field. This was mainly because I needed to include the
century in the several date fields and the sheer volume and complexity of extra
coding in Powerhouse Quick to cater for the editing, reading and writing of the
date fields as text was prohibitive.
 
It was much more efficient to make these fields Powerhouse dates and to take
advantage of the inbuilt Powerhouse date editing, century functions and
separators.
 
Also, it is not difficult to convert the Powerhouse dates to text using the
"ascii" function
of Powerhouse.
 
Just my 2 cents.
 
Cheers,
John Dunlop ([log in to unmask])