Pythonic Y2K

[mm0fmf]

On 17/01/2019 02:34, Avi Gross wrote:
>

>  but all it took was to set the clock forward on a test system and
> look for anomalies.

You're new to programming or you're not very  old and certainly haven't 
run much pre-Y2k software. ;-)

Issues that needed solving:

2 digits only for the date
use of 99 or 00 in the year for "magic" purposes
software that didn't know 2000 was a leap year

One machine I had to update (all in Z80 assembler) had the date in the 
format DD-MMM-199Y, i.e. only the units year could be changed. There was 
a comment in the date code saying

; marketing say this machine will stop being sold in 1993 so there
; is no need to support anything other than 1990-1999 in the year

It was still being sold in 2002!

The reason there were so few Y2K issues was that things were fixed in 
advance. And yes, there was also lots of stupidity and hysterics from 
people who didn't know. One major change, after people started fixing 
this in issue in earnest, dates started to always include the century 
digits.

Now get off my lawn! :-)