> However I can't help thinking that many of our problems would
> not exist if HP had put a date data type into Image years ago
> as I suggested (at Reno, pre-IPROF.

Well, we have been clients of HP and users of Image since 1984
and we standardized upon a six digit signed zoned decimal date
format in 1984.  Last New Years Day we converted all of our
dates everywhere to our new standard eight digit signed zoned
decimal date format.  It really was not that big a deal.

The issue seems to be a desire to get something for
nothing, i.e. to store the information without taking up the
space.  I suppose that this is a valid pursuit but
philosophically I have always had difficulty with the concept of
corrupting data for expediency.  A date, even if numerically
expressed, is not really a number, it is a text string that
follows a predictable pattern. When you start storing data
whose true representation is dependent upon some external factor,
that may or may not be known to others in some other place
or at some other time then you have corrupted your data.  We
chose not to use the PHDATE format in Powerhouse for this very
reason.  The single greatest advantage of zoned decimal that
recommended itself to us was the fact that it is human readable
even if all you have is an ASCII dump of a file or memory block.

We have bitten the bullet on the storage issue and and are now
set to handle dates until AD 9999 expires.  Many of the
proposals regarding Y2K rollovers seem only to be moving the
next event horizon out to 2049.  I don't see that that is much
of an improvement over what has gone on before.

Image had and has a perfectly good date format already.

Regards,
Jim
---
James B. Byrne                Harte & Lyne Limited
vox: +1 905 561 1241          9 Brockley Drive
fax: +1 905 561 0757          Hamilton, Ontario
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