Re: What fallback platform should VFP developers learn?

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Cy Welch seemed to utter in
news:0YGdnWiXI_YqccnbnZ2dnUVZ_o-knZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx:

Tim Witort wrote:
Cy Welch seemed to utter in news:OdydnRblINI_
3M7bnZ2dnUVZ_oLinZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx:

Gene Wirchenko wrote:
tim_witort@xxxxxxxxxxx (Tim Witort) wrote:

[snip]

Huh? Of what possible use could storing the last digit of a
year be? "Hey, Larry, I see the birth date of this client is
listed as '4'. Do you know what year that is?" "Uhhmmmm. I
think that one is 1954... no, wait, 1964... actually I'm not sure."
Consider an insurance claim. How likely is it for the claim to
be active for over ten years?

K-mart had a date code for when stock came in that was on their
store-generated price tags: MMWY. MM was the number of the month
and could be just one digit. W was the week of the month. Y was
the last digit of the year. What more did they need?

Your turn. Come up with a reasonable case. Obviously,
birthdate
is not it.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Computerese Irregular Verb Conjugation:
I have preferences.
You have biases.
He/She has prejudices.
Policy start and end dates as I understand. Since those are alway
within a year, it's not a problem for them. They generally just need
to know if it's last year, this year or next year.

It still sounds a bit fishy to me. I can see how it would
work with something short term like that, but I would expect
a company managing millions of dollars to store entire dates.
I could very well be wrong, but it seems so unlikely.

Since insurance and other similar companies seem to be using a lot of
old legacy code, it may be more cost affective to continue to use the
workarounds they already had in place well before Y2K than to change
all that code. I would expect that any new systems put in place would
not do that, but why change something that works already if you don't
need to.

I guess I just picture insurance as a pretty lucrative business
with pretty standardized data and computing needs. I would see
most large companies using a high-end application that would
definitely have full dates on everything (after all, insurance
is all about the actuarials). And smaller companies would have
their pick of many smaller, affordable insurance packages. It just
doesn't seem like an industry that would have a lot of custom
applications and legacy code from 30+ years ago. I can imagine that
they *used to* store a single digit, but still doing it today? And
*often*?

I did a Google search on "insurance software" and got over
a million hits. There appear to be hundreds of off-the-shelf
systems out there.

Maybe I should call my agent and ask him. :^)

-- TRW
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t i m . w i t o r t
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