Re: vn5.4 woes (today missing)

["Mark Hadfield" <m.hadfield(at)niwa.cri.nz>]

<wmc@bas.ac.uk> wrote in message 3a54a92e.0@news.nwl.ac.uk">news:3a54a92e.0@news.nwl.ac.uk...
> David Fanning <davidf@dfanning.com> wrote:
> >I thought all those date/time structures went away in IDL 5.2
> >because they could not be made Y2K compatible. You must still
> >be working on that data archive, William. :-)
>
> Hmmf, this is in fact working on climate model data, which ran past
> 2300 well before y2k came. And it seems to work still, once the right
routines
> are copied into place.

The lack of Y2K conpatibility lay in the fact that ONE of the routines (I
forget the name) would accept 2-digit years and do something not very smart
with them. The routine also accepted 4-digit years so people prescient
enough to use them would never have noticed a problem.

Pulling the IDLDT stuff was a lawyer-driven panic.

---
Mark Hadfield
m.hadfield@niwa.cri.nz  http://katipo.niwa.cri.nz/~hadfield/
National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research
PO Box 14-901, Wellington, New Zealand