"James B. Byrne" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>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.


This ASCII approach reminds me of the main reason for the initial success
of the Web.  Even though the concept took off in a highly sophisticated
Physics laboratory, HTML was not based on nuclear-particle-Physics
"proprietary" formats.  HTML was based on simple ASCII material, with
simple tags that everyone could (and still can) read by just dumping the
source of ANY web page in the world.

Jim has made an excellent point.  The fact that the Adager R&D folks have
bitten the bullet and gone through a lot of effort to support bizarre bit
configurations in all kinds of date-oriented formats (in addition to
supporting simple ASCII formats, of course) does not mean that we ENJOY
such gyrations or that we RECOMMEND them to unsuspecting users.  We are
just here to help people improve their year-2000 situations without forcing
them to take a given "standard".  I had a few friendly battles (is there
such a thing as a "friendly game of chess"?) with Fred White regarding this
very issue.  He believed that those people with screwy formats should
change them immediately to the "White Normal Form" -- WNF -- which is a
perfectly nice form that collates well, while I believed that they should
be given the freedom to remain screwy if they so desired :-)




 _______________
|               |
|               |
|            r  |  Alfredo                     [log in to unmask]
|          e    |                           http://www.adager.com
|        g      |  F. Alfredo Rego               Tel 208 726-9100
|      a        |  Manager, R & D Labs           Fax 208 726-2822
|    d          |  Adager Corporation
|  A            |  Sun Valley, Idaho 83353-3000            U.S.A.
|               |
|_______________|


                                                                .