| |
This is an important question. PC Profile, a software and consulting company
based in Adelaide, South Australia, offers one vendor's description in
their article that discusses whether there is such a thing as a fully compliant
system ( http://www.pcprofile.com/wilthere.htm
):
-
The program should require a century indicator on all dates that it receives
and produces.
-
All date calculations, whether in one century or multiple centuries, must
neither cause an abnormal ending nor generate incorrect results. [Duh!]
-
All records sort by date properly in both directions (ascending or descending).
-
Leap years will be determined correctly.
[See The
Year 2000 is a Leap Year.]
-
All hard-coding in century fields and date fields has been removed or prohibited.
-
Date fields are not used for purposes other than for dates. [For example,
using hard-coded dates such as 09/09/99 as an "end of file" marker.]
-
Applications that interface with other applications or that import or export
dates do not alter the date settings of other software.
The problem is, of course, that each vendor has its own definition, which may
not include all of these provisions. (The last provision is a hard one to follow;
see Remember -- what the vendors say might not
apply to you.)
What Does Y2K Compliant Not Mean?
It does not mean that you'll have any idea what the system will do when it
encounters dates with two digit years. Many use windowing schemes (see "The
Year 2000 Pledge" on page 4), and they're all different. The Federal Year 2000
Commercial Off-the-Shelf Product Database ( http://y2k.policyworks.gov/index.cfm
) has a quick summary of the Y2K behavior of many popular software packages,
including their windowing scheme; there's a link to it on the UIC
Year 2000 home page. |
|
