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Originally Posted by doubleshuffle
Ah, thanks for the opportunity for some enlightening Sunday morning googling.
But why were people so worried about the "millennium bug" back in the day, when it all comes down to binary numbers anyway?
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Because there are more ways of storing numbers than as pure binary. The Y2K bug was down to the year part of dates being stored as just the last two year digits. It may seem now that it must have been exaggerated because, after all, there were no great problems caused by the Y2K bug, but that's to overlook the large amount and many man years spent updating the problematic legacy systems before the end of 1999!
Quote:
Originally Posted by doubleshuffle
And when we get to 2147483647, I am confident we will have 64-bit signed integers at least, won't we?
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We already have 64-bt integers. But even when available, programmers might not use them. YouTube had to do an emergency switch to 64-bit numbers for video views when Gangnam Style broke the signed-32 bit integer limit!
The next inauspicious date is the unix roll-over in 2038. (Unix stores the time as number of seconds since midnight on 1st January 1970. Stored in a signed 32-bit number, that rolls over in the early hours of 19 January 2038.
That's only 22 years away!