The last program I used, Sierra's Generations (no longer published),
put children without birthdates last. I prefer that as well.
How they are sorted within themselves I don't much care -- my
preference would be to put them in the anticipated order of birth, if
known, which would be a manual effort. If they show up alphabetically
or some other way it would not matter to me, but again, I concur with
the opinion that unknown birthdate children should be at the end.
I've been learning a bit about the "quirks" (if I can call them that)
of Legacy versus Generations, such as the inability to do a mass
search ("search for anything in any field") because Legacy is
Access-based. I have no idea how Generations worked, but in some ways
I found it easier to use. Legacy, on the other hand, is more
customizable and has more features. If I could combine Legacy's
robustness with Generation's ease I'd be thrilled! But now I'm
off-topic... and besides, Generations hasn't been published in years
anyway.
So, back on point ... +9999999 would be preferable to -9999999.
Scott
On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 7:10 AM, Dennis M. Kowallek <kowal...@iglou.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:56:20 -0500, "Carl Cox" <ct...@centurytel.net>
> wrote:
>
> >When a computer sorts by date, it puts the lowest number first, as that is
> >all it knows how to do. No birth date is zero.
>
> Actually, Legacy stores "no birth date" as -99999999 (in tblIR.BirthSD),
> which is why it sorts first. The programmers could have stored "no birth
> date" as +99999999 if they had wanted to, which would have sorted last.
> They had to choose some value. Maybe a programmer will jump in and
> explain why they chose one over the other, if anyone even remembers.
>
> --
>
> Dennis Kowallek (LTools)
> http://zippersoftware.com/ltools
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ltools
>
>
>
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