Re: vn5.4 woes (today missing)

[William Daffer <whdaffer(at)earthlink.net>]

"Mark Hadfield" <m.hadfield@niwa.cri.nz> writes:

> <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) 

  str_to_dt.pro, I believe.


> 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.
> 

  I agree. I pulled them out of idl 5.2 and use them daily in all of
  my processing at work. If you use 4 digits, there's *absolutely* no
  problem!

whd
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