Re: Classic Traps -- I need your input!

["Francis Lapeyre" <flapeyre@xxxxxxxxx>]

Don't get me started on dates. Ten years ago, Y2K was closing in fast.
Althogh we used 7-digit CYYMMDD dates (and still do), none of the date
routines (just duplicated in all programs; no copybooks) accounted for
century. All programs were RPG III; we didn't have an ILE RPG program until
one of the RPG III's hit the 50-file limit.

Anyway, the old routines were using Julian dates (ouch!), and did not
account for leap year at all (Feb. 29 simply did not exist). I came up with
four or five callable programs written in RPG IV that did all the date
calcs. All of them are still in use today (we also have a service program
version of them for use in "true ILE" programs).

On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 7:47 AM, J M Plank <plank.computer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> This has been touched on, but we just had an example of a problem caused
> by
> not using modern code.  We had a situation where a date on an order needed
> to be a year in the future.  It failed on 2/29 (you can all see where this
> is going) as the new calculated date was 2/29/09.  The programmer refuses
> to
> use bifs, so took 21 lines to "fix" the problem.  Of course that fix broke
> today, as it calculated 3/0/09.  I tried to show him how he could solve
> the
> problem in a couple of statements, but he doesn't understand it.
>  Actually,
> he said "how can you add a year to a date without breaking it apart into
> month, day and year?"  <Sigh>  Yeah, we don't use true date fields either.
>
> Mark Plank
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