Re: Software Engineering News Brief

[tmoran@bix.com]

>"   I just looked this up and it needs correction: the system should be
>able to raise an exception when the year is outside 1901 through 2099,
>or the month is outside 1 through 12, etc.  If the vendor wants to allow
>the programmer to relax these rules, he'll have to allow the programmer
>to do it via a pragma, compilation time switch, or some such thing, and,
>of course, the vendor should then document just what his compiler allows."
>
>However, extending the range of Year_Number with a switch would be a highly
>inappropriate language extension in my view. It would be much better to
>provide an alternative package, e.g. Extended_Calendar, which looked similar
>to Calendar, but provided an extended period of coverage.
  Extending the range of Year_Number with a compiler switch might or might
not be a good idea, but turning off constraint checking either locally
on calls to Split, Time_Of, "+", "-" etc with a Pragma, or globally with
a compiler switch, is what I had in mind.  (Obviously Split et al must be
coded to properly handle such shenanigans, but we're assuming here that
a vendor is specifically trying to allow extension of the usual range.)