On Mon, 31 Aug 2020 22:39:59 -0000 (UTC), Martin Gregorie
 declaimed the following:


>Depends in the application: what you suggest works fine for the date on a
>report or at the top of a screen, but becomes a problem in other cases -
>I remember seeing a payroll back in the late '60s (6 digit date days)
>that *HAD* to handle birth dates in the 1890s. Not altogether easy on a
>system whose base date was 1/1/1900 !
>

 My response was solely in response to the COBOL verb to obtain
"current" date. Not about having to modify data files to handle multiple
centuries due to, as your example, DoB.

 If you want something nasty... I once worked on a system where an
identifier had to go from 6-bytes to 9-bytes -- but we were not (at the
time) permitted to change the data record size! (Too much code was based
upon the record size AND file total size.) We had to encode the identifiers
using RAD-50 character set. It wasn't until we'd gone through two file
resizes (from something like 3000 records, to 5000, and then to 10000
records -- the logic was using binary search to find records by a different
identifier field) that I managed to persuade the powers-that-be to convert
the file to ISAM, which removed the fixed size file as binary search was no
longer needed, that we were able to also revert the RAD-50 identifier to a
9-byte ASCII.


--
 Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
 wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/

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