Quote:
Originally Posted by saganista
No, you didn't. No one RPT no one who did could have come away with that conclusion.
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Yeah, I agree. I KNOW the code we modified would NEVER have worked properly without the changes made.
Unless someone can change the laws of mathematics, "00" will NEVER come after "99" - so ANY computer system that stored dates in a MM/DD/YY etc format and had ANY logic involving date comparison (ie checking someone's age, calculating billing cycles, etc) would not have functioned properly - and when you consider that ANY computer system which has ANY date data stored typically does a date comparison SOMEWHERE in the logic (otherwise there is not much point in storing a date) this works out to be LOT of systems.
As mentioned, newer systems were written with 4 digit dates, but the fact is (even if it was bad coding), LOTS of code out there had 2 digit years. To make matters worse, for much of this code there was no one around who really understood what it did any more. The code was so old, the original authors had long since moved on to other jobs and the software ran mostly on "autopilot" (it just hummed along so no one had really messed with it in years) so understanding of the internal logic was often pretty limited. Adding to the problem was the fact that such code was typically written in extremely verbose languages that usually resulted in programs comprised of thousands (or tens of thousands) of lines of code. I remember the paper printout of the first system I was ever responsible for maintain stood 9-10 inches thick.
Ken
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