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DATIME and the Year 2000 Ian Mclaren IT/ASD
The subroutine DATIME is probably one of the most heavily used
components of the CERN Program Library and is also used as the base for
other date and time routines both in Cernlib itself and in user
applications. Its documentation is misleading in that it documents the
year as 19xx. In the year 2000, the current version will return different
values depending on the operating system and some of them will be wrong or
unsatisfactory.
CALL DATIME(ID,IT) returns
the date as an integer in ID in the format
yymmdd and as small integers in a common block
SLATE/ISL(40) where ISL(1)
contains the year. We propose to modify DATIME
so that the format remains unchanged but the values become reasonable.
For January 1, 2000, it will produce:
ID=000101 ISL(1)=2000
This modified version will be available in the 98 release of CERNLIB
unless there are valid objections. However, users should check now how their
applications are using DATIME and that subsequent treatment
of the date will still be valid.