Re: HELP! YEAR 2000 BUG: How will it affect you?

bcoogler@dscga.com (Bolen Coogler) wrote: >Two things, folks: < snip > > Pope Gregory in the 16th century decreed >this additional rule: All years ending in '00' are NOT leap years, >EXCEPT when it is divisible by 400. Thus, 1600, 2000, 2400, etc. are >leap years. The last "skipped" leap year was 1900, and the next will be >2100. >This gives the Gregorian calendar a 400 year cycle, and years average >out to 365.2425 days. I don't know how close this jives with current >measurements of Earth's orbit, but it's still the calendar in use today. I believe the precise(-ish) figure would be 365.2422. It's been proposed that we rule that years divisible by 4000 would _not_ be leap years, which would take the average year length down to 365.24225. Still a bit of time before we need to sort that one out though. >The Year 2000 'bug' is not about leap years. It's primarily about >legacy systems--old programs still in use today, typically written in >COBOL--that use 2 digits to store the year. Back when disk and tape >densities were low and disk storage costs were high, you did whatever >you could to save on storage space. Using 4 digits to store a year was >considered wasteful. Other good stuff snipped (incidentally, I've also amended the newsgroups line, which was getting garbled). On the point about a newsgroup for this issue, there has in fact been a CFV (I must have missed the RFD) for setting up a y2k group. It's still open as I write; a search in Deja News on CFV and 2000 should bring up the details. Phil Edwards phil@news400.com Editor, NEWS/400.UK +44 (0)161 929 0777