Re: 9/9/99

I've truly enjoyed the 9999 debate. It's interesting that the "I can't imagine 
a pgmr
doing that" people in some way equates to the general public's dis-belief that 
we
"learned" programmers could ever do something so apparently (now) stupid as
our Y2K date problems. Many of you can't imagine 9999 (usually without slashes)
because the S/3 thru the AS400 kept us in the world of fixed field lengths. 
Much of
the rest of the world lives with variable length fields. Nine months of the 
year you
could save a byte on every date. As far as assigning special meaning to a 
field, dates
were great, because there were only 365 valid values. In the days of 8K regions 
to
run a pgm, few pgmrs created a seperate data field to flag End of File or End 
Pgm.
Some of you will view this the same way my kids don't understand black & white
TV. Oh - my 1st RPG instructor, on an IBM 1130, only had experience with
Air Force missile systems. He taught us all kinds of tricks. Fortunately I have
see the error of this kind of programming long ago.
BTW - this is the "most interesting Y2K code I've seen yet. This was live code,
last changed in 1988, and was part of a "Add # of Days" routine.

            YY      COMP      99                      LR    Cant handle this
Have fun.
Jim Franz
Systematic Control, Inc

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