Day of week routine

[Clayton Cramer]

In article <1989May30.155016.11099 at utzoo.uucp>, henry at utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
> In article <107107 at sun.Eng.Sun.COM> jamesa at arabian.Sun.COM (James D. Allen) writes:
# ## The mind boggles at how many programs had to be fixed to know about the
# ## new year numbering...
# #
# #Are you sure?  Even the most loyal of Japanese programmers should have
# #anticipated outliving the aging emperor...
# 
# Even the stupidest of North American programmers should anticipate that the
# first two digits of the year will change not too far in the future... but
# in fact often this gets botched.  Forecasting programs are already running
# into this:  1975 was a bad year for 25-year forecasts, and 1990 will most
# probably be a rough year for 10-year forecasts.  The chaos in 2000 AD will
# be something to behold.
# 
# What will happen when the 32-bit Unix date goes negative in mid-January
# 2038 does not bear thinking about... :-)
# -- 
# Van Allen, adj: pertaining to  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology

Even the stupidest should -- but when I raised this issue in a meeting
a couple of years ago, people laughed!  They thought I was making a
joke!  Especially since our equipment will have a very, very long
lifetime, this is an important issue.  After the Wall Street Journal
carried an article about "Doomsday" and its effect on data processing,
people started to take the subject seriously.

I sure hope that I have retired from computers before 2000 -- all
hell is going to break loose, if people aren't already planning to
bring on battalions of maintenance programmers to go looking for
year dependencies -- especially those sticky situations where someone
sorts by 2-digit year, and uses all the available characters in a
filename with the year included.
-- 
Clayton E. Cramer {pyramid,pixar,tekbspa}!optilink!cramer
"He chose...poorly." -- Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade
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