Ron
08-29-1999, 06:28 PM
A long time ago (in a far away land?) disk space was expensive and in short supply. Every single byte counted, and programmers were always looking for shortcuts.
Imagine, now, a customer record. There's this field for "Date Paid" and it really doesn't hold anything valid until the customer makes their payment. Right? Now we could just leave random bytes in the field, but shoot, wouldn't it be better if we could actually use it for something useful? So, instead of setting up a Yes/No field for whether the payment had come in, we could just set the "Date Paid" field so something to indicate they hadn't paid their bill yet. When they did pay the bill, we could insert the correct date. Gee, that saves us a whole byte of disk space...
Yep, you guessed it. The special info we inserted into that Date Paid field was a date SO FAR into the future we just knew we would never see it - 9/9/99.
Does it really matter? Well, say my electric bill is due on Sept 10th. Say I pay it on Sept 9th. On Sept 11th (or perhaps after a grace period of X days), there's going to be this little snippet of code somewhere that effectively says:
If DateDue > Today and DatePaid = "9/9/99" then
[nbsp][nbsp] ShutOff The Deadbeat's Electricity!
End If
Depending on the grace periods involved, this little problem could surface any time in the next several months. Of course, the moral is simple - don't pay anything on 9/9/99 !!!
Imagine, now, a customer record. There's this field for "Date Paid" and it really doesn't hold anything valid until the customer makes their payment. Right? Now we could just leave random bytes in the field, but shoot, wouldn't it be better if we could actually use it for something useful? So, instead of setting up a Yes/No field for whether the payment had come in, we could just set the "Date Paid" field so something to indicate they hadn't paid their bill yet. When they did pay the bill, we could insert the correct date. Gee, that saves us a whole byte of disk space...
Yep, you guessed it. The special info we inserted into that Date Paid field was a date SO FAR into the future we just knew we would never see it - 9/9/99.
Does it really matter? Well, say my electric bill is due on Sept 10th. Say I pay it on Sept 9th. On Sept 11th (or perhaps after a grace period of X days), there's going to be this little snippet of code somewhere that effectively says:
If DateDue > Today and DatePaid = "9/9/99" then
[nbsp][nbsp] ShutOff The Deadbeat's Electricity!
End If
Depending on the grace periods involved, this little problem could surface any time in the next several months. Of course, the moral is simple - don't pay anything on 9/9/99 !!!