Let's start the count down

[Monty J. Harder]

On Jan 17, 2008 4:14 AM, Luke -Jr <luke at dashjr.org> wrote:

> > It showed up because it's now because January 19, 2008 is Saturday and
> > things like 30 year mortgage calculation may start to fail next week.
>
> Interesting. I, at least, didn't even consider that.


Of course not.   It's far easier to over-hype these issues like Y2K was, or
over-react the other way, than to think things through completely.  Just as
640K was big enough for anybody, and YY was good enough for programs written
decades ago,  a shell script I wrote one winter to do date math (on Unix
systems without GNU date)  worked fine until it got to the end of July and
tried to add days to get to the month "08", whereupon it triggered a subtle
bug; it was being treated as octal due to the leading 0, and of course 8 and
9 are not valid octal digits.

If there are programs using 32-bit signed integers to do date math 30 years
in the future, they may suddenly find themselves broken horribly, showing a
date in December 1901 rather than 2038.
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