Re: Question: How will the Year 2000 bug impact your work?

Torrez (torrez@law.harvard.edu) wrote: : dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu (David W. Fenton) wrote: : : : >"Short date" is a format, not a data type. The date is still stored in : >long form, and you can type in a 4-digit year. It just won't _display_ as : >a 4-digit year. Unless it's an historical bibliography, there will be : >little ambiguity for the viewer of date fields displayed with only 2 : >digits for the years. : : It's not about displaying or storing. It's about entering. If you : enter a short date today with "00", Access 2.0 thinks it's 1900. : Likewise, if you enter a two-digit year in the year 2000 of "98", : Access will store it as 2098. Thus we have to force/allow the : users to enter 4-digit dates. With a short date format, you need to _nothing_ to _allow_ 4-digit years: you can already type "6/1/2001". Of course, you'll need to incorporate validation code so that users don't enter "6/1/01" when they mean 2001, or you can just change the formats to use 4-digit years. It shouldn't really be that hard just to change the date formats in forms and reports, even in an elaborate application. : I just read another post that said Access hasn't been around : that long-- it shouldn't have a year 2000 problem. But, : unfortunately, thanks to Microsoft and thanks to lazy : developers that didn't decide to think about the year 2000 : until this year, it does. Access does not force anyone to choose short date format, so however guilty Micro$oft may be of other things, they can't be accused of a making a mistake here. The dates are stored as full dates, it is only display and data entry behavior that are a problem. Those are left up to the devloper's choices. : I think this problem has been fixed in Access 7.0. (Not that : anyone is using it.) Well, as far as I know, there is no problem in any version of Access, only in the way some people have chosen to format dates in their applications. Access 97 is reported to have a feature that allows you to choose how Access will interpret 2-digit years. This will make it very easy to continue using 2-digit years. But it won't solve the problem for any older applications that were designed to use 2-digit years. David W. Fenton | New York University | The way of stylistic tolerance dfenton@bway.net | dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu | may lead to the final horror of http://www.bway.net/~dfenton | John Tesh. --Alex Ross, NYTimes