As others have suggested, many companies do still have SSNs stored as packed decimal. So sure, a namespace expansion is possible, but it's a bigger change than one might think, however it's done. I've even seen at least one company who stored them as binary! I sure hope someone got a big bonus for saving that byte...
Peter Farley wrote: >There are also many non-human entities like corporations that use the same SSN >value space. >There are a LOT of those . . . and they spring up and fade away at a rate far >higher than human births and deaths. They use the same namespace--that is, if your SSN is 123-45-6789, an estate or business could also have that number. Since they're uses for different things, it's more that they happened (!) to choose the same format than that they're "the same". (And actually they're theoretically formatted differently: an EIN is xx-xxxxxxx vs. the SSN xxx-xx-xxxx, not that most folks store them with the hyphens.) ...phsiii ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
