Re: [MacPerl] [ALBOT] Mac Y2K Oops?

[Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>]

At 08.59 -0500 1999.02.08, Richard Gordon wrote:
>The problem is not how any Mac app writes dates, it's how it reads them out of
>existing files that could come from anywhere.

And that problem would exist no matter WHAT the StringToDate function did.
If you supply a two-digit year in a string, the function has three choices:
assume the first century, assume years since 1900, or guess.  Since most
people will want 99 to be 1999 and 00 to be 2000, it has to guess.  And so
the fault does lie with the input data, which forces the function to guess
in the first place.

If you have a problem with the guess, then fix the date so it won't need to
guess.


>any other Mac app. More to the point, if the preferred "fix" is to untangle
>existing files by scanning them and resolving ambiguous dates according to
>your
>own arbitrary rules rather than relying on Apple's arbitrary rules before the
>files are used for anything, then I would say that MacPerl would be the first
>choice to use for this task as far as flat ascii files go just because of its
>speed and freely distributable nature.

Absolutely!  :)

--
Chris Nandor          mailto:pudge@pobox.com         http://pudge.net/
%PGPKey = ('B76E72AD', [1024, '0824090B CE73CA10  1FF77F13 8180B6B6'])

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