Re: Software Engineering News Brief

[tmoran@bix.com]

>>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
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".  ;)