Re: Software Engineering News Brief

[Tom Reid <tom_reid-sc661c@email.mot.com>]

tmoran@bix.com wrote:
> 
> >>Ada applications aren't likely to fail any time between now and January 1,
> >>2000, or beyond, for the simple reason that Ada doesn't let programmers
> >>represent dates in two-digit shorthand.
> >
> >Seems rather restrictive.
>   It's also incorrect.  Ada, like any other general purpose programming
> language, of course lets programmers encode dates any way they please.
> Ada *does* have a standard Calendar.Time type with a Year from 1901
> through 2099, which any product calling itself a validated Ada compiler

Let me see if I have this right.  Ada does not have a year 2000 problem
but it does have a year 2100 problem (not that this will affect any of
us).

Anyone know why they didn't make it a span of 255 years and not waste
digits?

> is required to support.  So programmers will usually find it simpler to
> use the standard than to 'roll their own' internal encoding.  The
> standard says nothing about external, human readable input/output
> formats, however, and as an international standard it could hardly demand
> conformance to, say, "MM/DD/YY" or "Fifth Day of November, Year of Our
> Lord Nineteen Hundred and Ninety Six".  ;)

Tom Reid, treid@primenet.com