Re: Dates

Alan wrote:
>The questions about dates has brought to mind a questions I have been
>wondering about for a long times.
>
>What is the purpose of stating a date format for a date when you declare
it
>in RPG ILE?
>
>The date is always stored in an internal date format as far I know so why
so
>*ISO or some other value? Very hard to believe that IBM stores it
>differently if you say *ISO or *MDY.
>
>When you do a conversion, you specify the format to or from. This has just
>never made any sense to me. Have nothing in the documentation that
explains
>this.

Actually, believe it or not, RPG actually does
maintain the date in the specified format (defaulting
to *ISO if not specified).

I'm not too crazy about this design myself, but it's
mainly a consequence of how the database handles
dates.  I believe the OS/400 database uses some
specific binary format for storing dates, but then
converts the date to the declared format on I/O.  So,
RPG sees the date in it's external format, not the
databases internal format.

Cheers!  Hans

Hans Boldt, ILE RPG Development, IBM Toronto Lab, boldt@ca.ibm.com


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