Re: Dates greater than 2039

<At the time they are entering the data, there is no question

about what "08" means...

I would totally agree, with one exception - birth dates, like in a census app.
In a hospital today I could have infants born in 2008 and elderly born in 1908 (this is from experience). Same for employee birth dates.
Lately I've written several apps that have a 10a entry field and user can
enter either in mmddyy or mm/dd/yy or mmddccyy or mm/dd/ccyy. The pgm reformats and always displays mm/dd/ccyy.
jim

----- Original Message ----- From: "Barbara Morris" <bmorris@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2008 8:28 PM
Subject: Re: Dates greater than 2039

Doug Palme wrote:

I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW we should be using 8 digit dates at the very least
and preferrably a complete usa format.....but I can only control so
much....we are getting there it is just taking a while to get the user
base on board.....and that is the push back. They think that entering
052208 takes less time than 05222008 which is true but who the hell is
counting micros when it comes to data entry....but that is the thinking.

Me, I can completely understand the users' position. It's painful to
have to take extra time to do something you don't want to do. For
example, I cannot abide having to take my hands off the keyboard to use
my mouse in cases where I don't know of a keyboard shortcut. Sure it
only takes a split second to do the mouse thing and get back to the
keyboard, but I feel every microsecond of that split second as a
separate stab to my psyche. Ok, that's an overstatement; it's one stab
for every _milli_second, not every microsecond.

Just my opinion, but I think you should allow your users to have 2-digit
years if they want, both for input and visual output, maybe even printer
output. At the time they are entering the data, there is no question
about what "08" means. The problem with 2-digit years comes when the
date is somewhere permanent like a database file or a literal in program
source.

Then you should convert them immediately to 4-digit year dates in your
programs before you do any processing on them.

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