AS400 Date Window For *MDY

["John Taylor" <john.taylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A short while ago, there was a thread that briefly discussed the date window
used by IBM for the *MDY format. It was generally acknowledged that this was
a fixed window ranging from 01/01/40 to 12/31/39, and that this window would
not be changed to represent the year 2040 and beyond. This theory is
supported by the behaviour of the date support routines in RPG. If you
attempt to move a date such as 01/01/2040 into a *MDY formatted date
variable, the program will encounter a date overflow condition.

This causes me to wonder, how many of us are out there creating a new date
problem in our applications? For example, have you created any printer files
or display files with a *MDY output field? If so, did you realize that these
are likely to fail on Jan 1st, 2040.

What if you're one of those who took the time to make sure all your output
dates match the job format, and the job format is set to *MDY? Does this
mean that you can no longer use *MDY as the job date format after Dec 31,
2039?

And what about the operating system itself? If your QDATFMT system value is
set to MDY, does that mean that IBM's own screens will fail as well?

Is there anyone out there (preferably from IBM) who can shed some light on
this?


John Taylor
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