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From: dewarr@my-dejanews.com
Subject: Re: Y2K Issues
Date: 1998/10/27
Message-ID: <713rca$gol$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>#1/1
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In article <wccww5n0wzc.fsf@world.std.com>,
  Robert A Duff <bobduff@world.std.com> wrote:

> I also can't help but point out that two 8-bit quantities can of course
> store a year-range of 65,536 years, so something's wrong when somebody
> decides to use 16 bits to represent a 100-year range, because they're
> short on memory, and 32 bits is too costly.  That kind of decision
> sounds more "convenient" or "expedient" than "intentional".


Any COBOL programmer worrying about space would use two 4-bit fields to
hold the date, using COMP-3 (packed decimal), but of course this still
allows 256 combinations, and indeed some of the standard Y2K solution
approaches use this extra space for coding (a nice solution because it
is backwards compatible with existing data files).

Robert Dewar

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