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Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Mansfield who wrote (907)	1/16/1998 6:46:00 PM
From: Tom C	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9818

John: My examples were run on a Windows95 machine. So they do not disprove that there might be a problem in Unix. Without using a Unix box, I can't be sure. I think we can count on there being problems with most languages and many systems. When someone wrote a program to display a form regardless of the language, the tendency in the 80's and earlier was to use mm-dd-yy for the field. I can remember times when we tried to use mm-dd-yyyy and the users gripped about having to specify 4 digits for the year. If a form uses mm-dd-yy then the interpretation of that date depends on the routine written by the programmer to convert that date. For example, if I stuff a character date 'mm-dd-yy' into a Oracle database date field then the first digits will be filled in by the database and it will assume the current century. For example, if in 1998, I insert the character string, '01-16-98', the date field in the database will be equivalent to January 16, 1998. After the year 2000, if I enter the same date using the same format the database will assume the current century, so inserting '01-16-98' will result in a database date value of January 16 2098. Depending what the program does, this can be a small problem or a big problem. Regards, Tom