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The LA Fox Developer Newsletter
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August 1999
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Dates and Times
(Con’t
from
page 7)
Text box bug
If you use the DATEO
function
in a text box, and if the system date is 2000 or later, you will always see a four-digit year, regardless of SET CENTURY. This is a bug, which appears to be present in all versions of VFP. There is a simple workaround:
set the InputMask property to 99/99/99.
“Give us back our eleven days"
You probably know that GOMONTH() can be used to add or subtract a number ot months to or from a date. Thus GOMONTh((11111990},-12) etums 1/1/1980.
But try this: ~OMoNTH((12I3111752),.12.The result is an invalid date. fact, GOMONTHO fails for any date before September 14, 1750
What is the significance of that date? There might be no connection, but it was on September 2, 1752 that England (along with Great Britain's American colonies) finally got around to adopting the Gregorian, or New Style, calendar. To bring the country into line, an 11-day correction was needed. So September 2 was immediately followed by September 14.
We don’t know whether this in any way explains the quirk in GOMONTHO. But other Visual FoxPro date functions seem
correctly returns Thursday. But CDOW({9/2/1752}) incorrectly returns Saturday — it was in fact a Wednesday (at least it was in England).
Earliest date
Still in a historical mood, what do you suppose is the earliest date that VFP can handle? Not {O/0/00}, whieh is considered to be an empty date. What about {1/1/00)?. Pass that date to CDOWO, for example, and you will see that it was a Monday. But ::hink about it. {1/1/00} is not January 1st in the year zero. In VFP 5.0 or earlier, it is the first day of 1900. Remember, two- digit years default to l9xx. Similarly, in VFP 6.0, it is taken as 1/1/2000. whieh is a Saturday.
In fact, there never was a year zero. In both the modern Gregorian calendar and its immediate ancestor, the Julian calendar, 1 BC was immediately followed by 1 AD. Perhaps the omission of a zero year was an oversight on the part of Sosigenes, the Greek astronomer who devised the Julian calendar. But it’s a fact. And it is at the root of the recurring argument about whether the third millennium really starts in 2000, or in 2001 as many people assert.
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new daughter. Lauren Christine Campbell was born 8/7/99 at 2:47 p.m. weighing 6 lbs. 15 oz and 20.25 inches in length. Healthy and happy. You can check her out at http:// www.interthing.com/baby.html
Coot Websites and Great Timewasters, If you’re ever stuck and wondering what you r,an do to waste a little time, try these:
http://pigeons.net/softwars.htm
http://www.customsavers.com/index_wpdel.html http://www.danworld.com
http://www.urban75.com/Mag/useless.html http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/
http://www.mightycool.com/
For those of you who have always wanted to add interesting WAV files to your apps, try:
http://www.ce.net/users/jones/wavs.html http://www.cybermonkeysworld.com/wavs/wavs.html http://soundamenca.com
Well, that’s about all for now.
It Can’t Get Any Easier....
We’ve come up with an easy way to submit articles to the
LA
Fox
Developer Newsletter
one that has been overlooked for
a long time.
You can submit your articles to Barry Lee at CIS# 72723,3422 on Compuserve, or
brlee@earthlinknet.
These articles can be on any FoxPro-related topic, whether
it
concerns a new technique you’ve discovered, a certain development technique you may favor over others, book reviews, etc. Editor reserves the right to edit or offer constructive comments concerning submitted articles and accepted articles shall be considered to be in the public domain.
The quality of this newsletter really depends on the members that support it, not just read it. And I think we’d all be surprised by the useful information that could be circulated around the membership.
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