At 09:53 AM 10/18/2005, you wrote:
From: "Stanislav Borisov" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> I'm just wondering why exactly the year 1904 is chosen for
> start date in the Palm 'DateType'. It is strange for me becouse in this
> case max possible year is limited to 2031.
> Why bigger year is not chosen for start, for example- 1950, 1970...?
>
It's set early AFAIK to avoid problems with historical dates
such as people's date of birth, and when it was chosen 2031
was a looooong way off.
As for why that date exactly I think it's related to leap year
calculations. By avoiding 1900 they avoided some possibly
complicated leap year issues (only to run into them again in
Y2K, of course).
Actually, the leap year problems did not occur with 2000, since it was a
multiple of 400 and had a leap day -- 1900 didn't have a leap day, so
handling it would have been a problem.
See http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/year-2000/leap.html for
funny details.
-- Ben Combee, Senior Software Engineer, Palm, Inc.
"Combee on Palm OS" weblog: http://palmos.combee.net/
Developer Forum Archives: http://news.palmos.com/read/all_forums/
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