Re: Software Engineering News Brief

[eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)]

In article <3280BAFA.1B2F@email.mot.com> Tom Reid <tom_reid-sc661c@email.mot.com> writes:

  > Anyone know why they didn't make it a span of 255 years and not waste
  > digits?

    Because 1900 was not a leap year, and 2100 will not be a leap
year, but 2000 will be a leap year.  So 1901 to 2099 is the longest
span possible without requiring implementors to include a leap year
rule that has never been used in practice.  (The rule that years
divisible by 400 are leap years, in spite of the rule about years
divisible by 100.)

    I'm sure that the next version of Ada will support a longer range
of dates, but I doubt that it will go too far back.  In fact, there
are areas where Gregorian dates from the beginning of this century are
nonsense, since Greece and Russia among others were still using the
Julian calendar in 1901.

--

					Robert I. Eachus

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