Re: dates B.C.

> > In article <4hv3t1$o2r@accursio.comune.bologna.it> > ret2519@iperbole.bologna.it "Giorgio Bignozzi" writes: > > > How can I use a date value to store a date Before Christ ? > > Please don't suggest to use a flag ! > > I havn't tried this myself but as Informix stores dates as some kind of > integer value I would suspect this is NOT a problem so long as your > DBDATE is set to 'DMY4' (I'm in the UK!) not 'DMY2'. I would > test this with a basic PERFORM screen. 31/Dec/1899 (or is it > 01/Jan/1900?) are stored as zero. Dates before this are stored as > negative numbers, dates after as positive ones - hence the ability > do do arithmetic on dates. > > Hope this helps! Ok, but how do you enter them? -03/15/0044 (sorry Julius) doesn't go in on a sperform form. I've tried a number of combinations of a negative sign and any of those fields. All choke - invalid date. Ok, so: create table junk (dtfld DATE); insert into junk values ("01/01/0001"); select * from junk; dtfld 01/01/0001 -- so far so good. update junk set dtfld = dtfld - 1 units day; 519: Cannot update column to illegal value. (I also tried this with - 44 units year - to get over any conceptual problems of year '0' - same result). I get more and more curious. based on this evidence I would venture to say that Informix does not support BC dates. Still - I've been wrong once or twice before..... cheers j. _____________________________________________________________________________ Jack Parker - Hewlett Packard, DMD/IS Boise, Idaho, USA jparker@hpbs3645.boi.hp.com _____________________________________________________________________________ If anything can go wrong, fix it. To hell with Murphy. _____________________________________________________________________________ Any opinions expressed herein are my own and not those of my employers. _____________________________________________________________________________