Science Memes

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submitted 2 years ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/science_memes@mander.xyz

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[–] Tranus@programming.dev 0 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Y2K specifically makes no sense though. Any reasonable way of storing a year would use a binary integer of some length (especially when you want to use as little memory as possible). The same goes for manipulations; they are faster, more memory efficient, and easier to implement in binary. With an 8-bit signed integer counting from 1900, the concerning overflows would occur in 2028, not 2000. A base 10 representation would require at least 8 bits to store a two digit number anyway. There is no advantage to a base 10 representation, and there never has been. For Y2K to have been anything more significant than a text formatting issue, a whole lot of programmers would have had to go out of their way to be really, really bad at their jobs. Also, usage of dates beyond 2000 would have increased gradually for decades leading up to it, so the idea it would be any sort of sudden catastrophe is absurd.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 1 points 2 years ago

With an 8-bit signed integer counting from 1900...

Some of the computers in question predate standardizing on 8 bits to the byte. You've got a whole post here of bad assumptions about how things worked.

[–] SkippingRelax@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

a whole lot of programmers would have had to go out of their way to be really, really bad at their jobs.

You don't spend much time around them, do you?

[–] TheOctonaut@mander.xyz 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The issue wasn't using the dates. The issue was the computer believing it was now on those dates.

I'm going to assume you aren't old enough to remember, but the "only two digits to represent the year" issue predates computers. Lots of paper forms just gave two digits. And a lot of early computer work was just digitising paper forms.

[–] Scrollone@feddit.it 2 points 2 years ago

I remember paper forms having "19__" in the year field. Good times

[–] breakingcups@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago

You do realize that "counting from 1900" meant storing only the last two digits and just hardcoding the programs to print"19" in front of it in those days? At best, an overflow would lead to 19100, 1910 or 1900, depending on the print routines.