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by unwind 440 days ago
See https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-an....
3 comments

So a little silly, a little serious.

On a practical note, we don’t tend to prefix zeroes to numbers because they are superfluous. If programmers are using strings to store a year and those strings are limited to four digits, your project likely has a host of other issues that will become problems long before Y10K.

We already have a precedent, in programming, for prefixed zeroes having meaning: “an octal number follows.” Much like 0x indicates a hexadecimal number.

I hope this is satire?

Just in case it's serious or semi-serious:

It's utterly ridiculous to worry about 10k date problems given we first have these:

2038 problem ( Signed unix time overflow )

2069 problem ( strptime() parsing )

2079 problem ( unsigned days since 1 January 1900 )

2100 problem ( FAT/DOS )

2106 problem ( Unsigned unix time overflow )

Further out but still way before 10k:

2262 ( signed nanoseconds since 1 January 1970 )

And that's just the bigger ones. ( See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bu... )

What's the point of prefixing 0 to dates written forum posts? It just confuses contemporary human readers.

Historians do a reasonable job at adequately translating dates from thousands of years ago across multiple calendar changes and societal collapses. Whatever future historian 10k+ years in the future is reading your post, should it survive, will be able to work out the date in the post, just from the language and other context clues alone.

It'll be hard to confuse 12025 with 2025 in the same way it's hard to confuse 2025 with AD 25.

a leading zero "implies" octal at least since K&R C, which predates that page by 000000043 years. You guys need a different prefix for that.