Re: 9/9/99

Actually, in regards to Y2K, back in 1985 I was working for a company that
sold software.  I noticed the problem with 2 digit years, and told my boss, the
owner of the company, that this would be a problem in the next century.

His response?  Yes, it would be a problem, but he had 15 years to fix it, and
the people using his software would have to upgrade before then if they wanted
to use his software, or it would crash.

This person was not... honorable.  I actually saw him PUT bugs in MY code,
because I had written this program totally bug free, it never crashed any time 
for
any reason, and he couldn't handle it.  See, he also charged yearly maintenance
fees, and if the code was too good, people wouldn't pay.

Needless to say, within 2 weeks of him putting bugs in my code I was out of 
there.

Even programmers have their morals.

Regards,

Jim Langston

franz99@ibm.net wrote:

> 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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