Re: I guess I don't know dates

The big thing to remember about dates is that they are
actually stored as a Lilian* date as a binary integer.

I think it's a little murky to use the word "stored" there. The
*internal* representation is a binary Lilian (or close enough) date.
By "internal", IBM means (approximately) "in memory".

I believe external representations (which are formatted) include not
only displays, but storage in physical files (which is what I think of
when I see "stored"). As mentioned before in this thread, when you
specify DATFMT in the DDS, the field in the physical file will be
sized and formatted accordingly. (As far as I can tell, the
*physical* representation of a date in a PF is identical to the
appropriately edited character string. The only difference being that
the field is declared as type L instead of type A.)

Either that, or a lot of trouble has gone into fooling disk tools like
DSPPFM, DBU, etc.

John