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From: Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>
Subject: Re: Ada Calendar oddity <was Re: C date package>
Date: 2000/05/21
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Date: 2000-05-21T00:00:00+00:00
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In article <3924B35E.DC0C9CDF@acenet.com.au>,
  Geoff Bull <gbull@acenet.com.au> wrote:
> It was that kind of narrow (focussed on one problem) thinking
> that led to the y2k bug!

No, that's a mis-characterization. The Y2K bug was a product
of two unrelated phenomena:

1. Legacy code had a life time much longer than expected.

2. COBOL has very poor data abstraction capabilities, so
the problem could not be solved in the obvious manner, even
for well written code.


In the case of Ada, it is arguable whether todays legacy code
will last a hundred years in unchanged form.

In any case, well written code will simply not be dependent
on the range in any case, so changing the range will have no
effect on existing code. If anyone was interested for example,
it would be trivial to provide a version of Calendar for GNAT
that did not have this limit (it requires a couple of
declarations to be changed, and one simple test added to the
leap year circuit).




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