From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@world.std.com>
Subject: Re: Y2K Issues
Date: 1998/10/26
Date: 1998-10-26T00:00:00+00:00 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <wccww5n0wzc.fsf@world.std.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: 710nnc$jop@felix.seas.gwu.edu
mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) writes:
> Unlike the Y2K "problem", which is caused by the unintended
> consequences of an old but intentional engineering decision
^^
> (2-digit years in the days of expensive storage),
Hmm. I wouldn't call it a single design decision. Lots and lots of
folks made this same decision, semi-independently of each other. I
imagine it was sometimes intentional, and sometimes not.
Anyway, IMHO these decisions aren't the cause of the Y2K problem. Lack
of abstraction is. If you wrote a million-line program a long time ago,
and decided 2-digit years were the right trade-off, and documented that
fact, and documented why, and encapsulated that decision in a single
module, then finding and fixing the problem would be no big deal. On
other hand, if you scatter that knowledge all over the program, then
it's a huge amount of trouble to find all those places. If you lose the
source code, it's even worse.
I would be naughty if I didn't mention Ada in a posting to this
newsgroup, so I'll just point out that Ada makes it a lot easier to
encapsulate this sort of thing than COBOL does.
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".
>...the leap-year
> bug is a _bug_, and is, apparently much more widespread than
> just this Microsoft case. In scouring code for the 2-digit
> problem, they are discovering the bug as well.
>
> Amazing. Where did these people go to school?
Maybe I'm just cynical, but I don't find bugs to be "amazing" anymore.
;-)
- Bob
--
Change robert to bob to get my real email address. Sorry.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~1998-10-26 0:00 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 61+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
1998-10-19 0:00 Y2K Issues John J Cupak Jr
1998-10-19 0:00 ` dewar
1998-10-19 0:00 ` Tucker Taft
1998-10-19 0:00 ` Joe Gwinn
1998-10-20 0:00 ` Joe Gwinn
1998-10-19 0:00 ` Niklas Holsti
[not found] ` <362B8D2F.802F42E6@lmco.com>
1998-10-20 0:00 ` dennison
1998-10-23 0:00 ` Michael F Brenner
1998-10-20 0:00 ` Robert I. Eachus
1998-10-22 0:00 ` Mark Bennison
1998-10-22 0:00 ` dennison
1998-10-23 0:00 ` Robert I. Eachus
1998-10-25 0:00 ` Michael Feldman
1998-10-26 0:00 ` dennison
1998-10-27 0:00 ` dewarr
1998-10-27 0:00 ` Tucker Taft
1998-10-27 0:00 ` Y2K Issues (well, not really...) Dave Wood
1998-10-28 0:00 ` Y2K Issues dennison
1998-10-28 0:00 ` Dave Wood
1998-10-27 0:00 ` John Herro
1998-10-26 0:00 ` Robert A Duff [this message]
1998-10-26 0:00 ` Joel Seidman
1998-10-26 0:00 ` Y2K Issues - Warning Off-Topic Al Christians
1998-10-27 0:00 ` Y2K Issues dewarr
1998-10-27 0:00 ` dewarr
1998-10-29 0:00 ` system
1998-10-29 0:00 ` Al Christians
1998-11-02 0:00 ` Marin David Condic
1998-11-04 0:00 ` Robert I. Eachus
1998-11-05 0:00 ` dewarr
1998-11-06 0:00 ` Jerry van Dijk
1998-11-07 0:00 ` dewarr
1998-11-06 0:00 ` Al Christians
1998-11-08 0:00 ` Jerry van Dijk
1998-11-08 0:00 ` dewarr
1998-11-06 0:00 ` Robert I. Eachus
1998-10-27 0:00 ` Gautier de Montmollin
1998-10-28 0:00 ` dewar
1998-10-28 0:00 ` Gautier.DeMontmollin
1998-10-28 0:00 ` Jean-Pierre Rosen
1998-10-28 0:00 ` Robert I. Eachus
1998-10-29 0:00 ` Dale Stanbrough
1998-10-29 0:00 ` Tucker Taft
1998-10-29 0:00 ` dewar
1998-10-29 0:00 ` Tucker Taft
1998-10-30 0:00 ` dennison
1998-10-31 0:00 ` dewarr
1998-11-02 0:00 ` dennison
1998-10-30 0:00 ` Dale Stanbrough
1998-10-30 0:00 ` Matthew Heaney
1998-10-31 0:00 ` dewar
1998-10-29 0:00 ` Mark A Biggar
1998-10-29 0:00 ` Samuel Mize
1998-10-28 0:00 ` Arthur Evans Jr
1998-10-28 0:00 ` adam
1998-10-28 0:00 ` Al Christians
1998-10-29 0:00 ` Samuel Mize
1998-11-04 0:00 ` Robert I. Eachus
1998-10-28 0:00 ` adam
1998-10-29 0:00 ` Gautier.DeMontmollin
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
1998-10-23 0:00 Condic, Marin D.
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