Re: Software Engineering News Brief

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

tmoran says

"   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."

Well of course you can do anything with a compiler switch, even recognize
C++ instead of Ada :-)

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.