BPM Meeting

[Vanderhoof, Tzadik]

I also saw a few 19100's in my Y2K surfing, the first one being at an
Australian site right after they rolled over.  Sadly, just about all of
these were probably Perl scripts.

19100 is a classic case of the results of a hack job, where you just keep
making changes until the program seems to work, without understanding what
you're doing, and certainly without looking at the documentation.  A pretty
sorry way to program IMHO, Perl or no Perl, Y2K or no Y2K.

On the flip side, though, I think the way Unix "localtime" returns the year,
while technically Y2K compliant, was designed in a way that begs to be
abused.  If Larry Wall had really been a Y2K zealot he could have
conceivably made Perl's "localtime" incompatible with the Unix version and
return a 4-digit year, thus pre-empting the 19100 problem.

But I can see why Larry wouldn't want to introduce a confusing
incompatibility into Perl, just to prevent one type of mistake, especially
considering that the type of bumbling programmers that make that mistake are
probably making a whole lot of other mistakes, which can't be pre-empted so
simply.  The people who designed Unix, on the other hand, could have been
more forward-thinking in their design.

-----Original Message-----
From: James W. Sandoz; (BIO;FAC) [mailto:sandoz at umbc.edu]
Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2000 6:44 AM
To: Vanderhoof, Tzadik
Cc: 'baltimore-pm-list at hfb.pm.org'
Subject: RE: BPM Meeting


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000101/aponline013722_000.ht
m

Headline: "Nation's Timekeeper Says It's 19100"

Looks like the US Naval Observatory used a similar script.

Mr. James W. Sandoz, Instructor, UMBC Dept of Biol Sciences,  
				 1000 Hilltop Circle
				 Catonsville, MD 21250
voice: (410) 455-3497; fax: 455-3875; net: sandoz at umbc.edu