From: John D. Burger (john@mitre.org)
Date: Wed Dec 07 2005 - 07:25:20 CST
Philippe Verdy wrote:
> From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <mark@kli.org>
>
>> After all the fuss about Y2K six years ago, how can anyone seriously
>> consider two-digit years? This shouldn't even be a question.
>
> Almost all the fuss was unjustified, and infact proved to be not a
> problem, because databases already store years in machine-readable
> format that includes the complete year, or using a time counter with
> simple units like seconds.
Must ... resist ... cannot ...
The assertion about databases is nonsense - see Richard T. Snodgrass's
book, Developing Time-Oriented Database Applications in SQL, for a very
nice description of all the screwed-up ways that databases used to
store and interpret two-digit years. It's out of print, but available
on-line here:
http://www.cs.arizona.edu/people/rts/tdbbook.pdf
As for the "unjustified fuss", we may never know for sure, but arguably
Y2K proved to not be a big problem exactly because people made a lot of
fuss, spent a lot of money, and rewrote a lot of code (and database
schemas).
- John D. Burger
MITRE
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