On 2019-08-14 8:40 PM, Raphaël Jacquot wrote:
that's what they said in 1965 when they were storing years in dates on 2
digits...
hilarity ensued in 1999 when they were all panicked that their 1964
vintage cobol code world would crumble...
Yeah...
Didn't Fred Brooks in "The Mythical Man Month" complain that OS/360
wasted 24 bytes by catering for a leap year changing from 28th Feb to
29th? The operator could manually fix that without OS help - after all,
it only happened once every four years.
So, you are updating your master file with millions of records and for
each record you go through 5 excess instructions (say) to cater for the
year 2100. How long extra will several lots of 5 million instructions
take on today's BIPS engines? Less than a thousand I/O operations?
It's nice to reduce path length overhead, but it's also nice to be
future proof - or at least future tolerant.
Cheers,
Greg
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