Re: Software Engineering News Brief

[rsrodger@wam.umd.edu (Robert Rodgers)]

kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen) wrote:
>In article <01bbd490$356f8220$686700cf@ljelmore.montana>, "Larry J. Elmore" <ljelmore@montana.campus.mci.net> writes:
>> 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.

I don't see why you wouldn't want to use, say, a 128bit dating system.
This would allow indexing the contents of the filesystem by date --
including the geological record, and all of human history.  For a huge
database system (say, of the sort that futurists like to talk about
for ~50 to ~100 years from now) this would be quite useful (especially
since timestamp on files has pretty much become useless).

The compiler could catch whacky dates at compile time -- and allow
their use if desired.  There is no reason whatsoever to limit the
language proper to a specific date period.


rsr

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