Splitting numeric litterals

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 16 Jul 2010 15:41:45 +0100, MRAB wrote:

>> It always makes me laugh when I receive an invoice from some company,
>> and the account number or invoice number is (e.g.) 1000000023456789.
>> Who do they think they're fooling?
>> 
> It's possible that they're splitting it into fields.

Anything is possible. It's possible that they're encoding secret 
instructions to their army of sleeper agents in the invoice numbers too, 
but how likely is it?

Good accounting practice is to treat invoice numbers as a simple unique 
numeric key. Every accounting software I've used has started the invoices 
at some value N, and returned N+1, N+2, N+3, ... with the starting value 
N user-configurable. But even if some software flies in the face of all 
accounting principles, good database design, and common sense, by 
overloading invoice numbers to include "fields" (of what?), what is the 
likelihood that my fields just happen to be virtually all zero?


-- 
Steven