Re: Software Engineering News Brief

["Larry J. Elmore" <ljelmore@montana.campus.mci.net>]

Robert Dewar <dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu> wrote in article
<dewar.848230046@merv>...
> Almost all programs that let users enter dates will want to consider
> a date from the 25th century as illegal, just as illegal as the 30th of
> February. It is indeed a specialized requirement to need dates very far
> from the present. I certainly have never written such a program, and I
> have written MANY programs that handle dates!

I agree that it's unnecessary for Ada to directly support dates rtanging
over thousands of years, but IMHO the 1900-2099 A.D. limit is just too
small. For example, any program dealing with birthdates of people (and I'm
thinking mainly in the health care field right now where many patients are
elderly), many people alive today were born before 1900. Ada *should*
directly support dates widely used in many programs today. Granted, this is
a self-correcting problem as those people born before 1900 die off (and,
granted, there's not many of them left now as it is), but I honestly can't
see why the Calendar package is so limited. Why would it have been so bad
to give it a somewhat larger range?


-- 
Larry J. Elmore

"A man's worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions."
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, "Meditations," c. 170 A.D.

"The universe is change; our lives what our thoughts make of it."
-- Ibid.