RE: Physical Files with numeric dates?

I know of one old package that stores the dates as a 5 digit number. The
original programmer called them "century dates". Day number one of the
century was 00001, and the last day of the century is 36525. The package was
sold internationally, so there was no worry about where the machine was
installed.

His algorithm looked at something inside the OS and figured out which
country the machine was located, how the dates were to be presented to the
end user, and to interpret what the user had entered as a date. Internally,
the date was just a number.

The rest of us programmers just needed to know how to feed the dates into
his formula. For query tool users, we had to create an auxiliary file that
provided the dates in local format.

Paul Nelson
Cell 708-670-6978
Office 409-267-4027
nelsonp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx


-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Birgitta Hauser
Sent: Wednesday, January 28, 2015 4:32 AM
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
Subject: Physical Files with numeric dates?

We just had a discussion tody concerning numeric date and time fields.
And just because I'm curisous:

How many of you are still using numeric fields (may be a rather big crowd -
at least those working with old applications)
But how many of you are using date fields in your tables where the year or
century year is NOT in the first position, i.e. in a Format MMDDYY or
MMDDYYYY or DDMMYY or DDMMYYYY?


Mit freundlichen Grüßen / Best regards

Birgitta Hauser

"Shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the stars." (Les
Brown)
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." (Derek Bok)
"What is worse than training your staff and losing them? Not training them
and keeping them!"