Time (was: Character set wars (was: In defense of Google))

Ben Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Tue Jan 31 16:49:01 EST 2006


On 1/31/06, Fred <puissante at lrc.puissante.com> wrote:
> If I had my way, *everything* would be Unicode and the entire problem would
> become moot overnight.

  Sure.  Heck, as long as we're wishing, let's just start out using
Unicode right from the start, and skip the ASCII -> Unicode transition
entirely.  ;-)

> As far as the Y2K fiasco, that was kind of a non-event.

  That depends on which "Y2K" you're talking about.  I was referring
to the work done finding and fixing actual problems, not the
media-induced "the world is going to end" crap.  :) There was a huge
amount of code that needs to be examined and various problems fixed. 
That work happened over years and even decades.  The biggest myth
about Y2K is that the problems were going to happen on 1 Jan 2000.  My
personal Y2K experience was in 1998, when a program I happened to be
supporting tripped over a bug in an expiration date calculation
routine.  What about railroads that schedule things out years in
adance?  They started hitting Y2K in the early 1990s.  What about
banks that manage 30 years mortages?  Their Y2K issues started in the
1970s!

  Getting everything working for Y2K was a long, slow, process that
involved finding and fixing a lot of obscure, irritating bugs over
time, and replacing a lot of ancient code that couldn't be updated. 
That's what the Unicode migration is already like.  :-)

> What will be interesting to see, and most of us will be around when it
> happens, is the time the Unix clocks run to an end in 2038. I would like to
> think by then all timers will be 64-bit (or similar), but you'll never know
> for sure.

  Same deal, I expect.  The problems won't all happen at once.

-- Ben



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