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Date:      10 Jul 1998 13:10:04 +0200
From:      dag-erli@ifi.uio.no (Dag-Erling Coidan =?iso-8859-1?Q?Sm=F8rgrav?= )
To:        John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com>
Cc:        des@FreeBSD.ORG, committers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/release Makefile
Message-ID:  <xzpk95muflf.fsf@hrotti.ifi.uio.no>
In-Reply-To: John Polstra's message of "Thu, 09 Jul 1998 16:02:31 -0700"
References:  <199807092302.QAA12959@austin.polstra.com>

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John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com> writes:

> > As I see it, the Y2K problem is not about how computers represent
> > dates, it's about how people think about dates.
> 
> That seems backwards to me.  People never get confused about 2-digit
> years.  There's not a FreeBSD user alive who would think that a SNAP
> year of "00" meant anything except 2000.  (Actually, I encountered

That's not what I meant.

If people continue to think of years in two-digit terms, people will
continue to write programs which use two digits to store years. There
isn't and has never been any sound technical reason to use two digits
instead of four. If you're concerned about conserving space in a
database, there are other and better ways to do it than to encode
years in ASCII. You can cram four BCD digits in the same space, or
sixteen binary digits.

DES
-- 
One two, one two, one two.

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