Steve writes:

> digits. It seems to me that we should bite the proverbial bullet and say
> HPYEAR is the 4 digit year, as of a particular V.U.F And then
> hpSHORTyear, or hpyearincentury become meaningful values for the 2 digit
> aberration!>>

Gee...if we were going to break existing scripts, let's go all the
way and make HPDATE be something useful!
(HPDATE is the day-of-month...something not at all intuitive)
:)

Seriously, I think backward compatibility is too important here, and
that's why I prefer having one or both of the following:


   HPYYYYMMDD    ... clearly tells reader what's in it
   HPYYYY        ... ditto

Note that I'm not particularly worried about not being able to represent
dates past 9999-12-31.  Although I'm sure that in 9996 the remaining
HP3000 users will be complaining about our short sightedness, I expect
to have migrated to the HP 30000 (the 32, no, 64, no, 32768-bit wide
great great...great grandchild of the HP3000) by the end of the year 3000.

--
Stan Sieler                                          [log in to unmask]
                                     http://www.allegro.com/sieler.html