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Date:      09 Dec 1998 15:06:07 +0100
From:      Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@flood.ping.uio.no>
To:        Peter Dufault <dufault@hda.com>
Cc:        tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Year 2k and PC hardware
Message-ID:  <xzpr9u98l68.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no>
In-Reply-To: Peter Dufault's message of "Sat, 5 Dec 1998 04:43:02 -0500 (EST)"
References:  <199812050943.EAA17915@hda.hda.com>

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Peter Dufault <dufault@hda.com> writes:
> > While the "all nines" stop is a time honored tradition in COBOL,
> > both the day and the month field are two digits, not one digit,
> > and therefore the stop is 99/99/99, which will never happen,
> > not " 9/ 9/99".
> Are you sure?  I also heard the "9999 flag" thing on the radio last
> year, but the date mentioned was in April.  I guess that would
> make it the ninety-ninth day of 1999.

There are OSes (e.g. OS/360) which store the date as the year and the
number of days since new year (in "The Mythical Man-Month", Brooks
gripes about wasting 26 bytes on code that handled 12/31 properly in
leap years, rather than leaving it to the operator)

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smorgrav - des@flood.ping.uio.no

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