01 Mar 99 19:27, Melanie Baillot wrote to Arun Jayaprakash:

 MB> Can someone explain why they just can't do it from 1000 to 9999 ?? 

That would be another self-imposed limitation that would actually
require more code to create. To have the year limited to 9999 would mean
a 4 charachter string. To make the year limit 65535 would require a 2
byte word. To make the year limit 2147418113, we could use a 4 byte
longint, or to make the year limit 4294836225 we could use a 5 byte
unsigned longint.

As for why "they" can't "do it" from xxx to yyy, money. Back when
computers were first becoming standard methods of data storage, storage
space cost a lot of money. 20 meg HDD's cost thousands of dollars.

Imagine 100,000 bank records. There are three places in the record where
we need to store the year. If we chop the century from those years,
we're saving 2 * 3 * 100,000 = 600,000 bytes = several hundred dollars
worth of HDD space.

Now, imagine two million records with 10 places where the date is
stored, or a spreadsheet with 500,000 entries - each entry containing
the date 25 times.

As hardware prices dropped, programmers (lazily, or because they were
told to by their employers) continued the trend of dropping the century.
Welcome Y2K problem.

   Stewart Honsberger (AKA Blackdeath)     WWW: http://sprk.com/blackdeath
   E-Mail: blackdeath@tinys.oix.com        ICQ: 3484915

... I'm NOT schizo!  Oh, yes I AM!
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