Conference waylay::askenet_v5

Well, I saw an Internet article Tuesday last week which said that France
wouldn't be affected because they use a numbering system with multiples of
20, so the year would go from ..quatre-vingt-dix-neuf to ...cinq-vingt.

				Steve

    Re .1: Steve, I'm afraid this article is either bogus or outdated by
    five or six centuries...
    
    	We still use soixante-dix, quatre-vingts and quatre-vingt-dix for
    70, 80 and 90 but, beside the fact that we generally use numerals
    rather than spelling these (rather tedious...), which leaves us wide
    open to the year 2000 syndrom, cinq-vingts and six-vingts for 100 and
    120 have been out of use since the middle age (the only well known
    occurrence of six-vingts in French literature is in "La farce de Maitre
    Patelin", a play that dates back to the 14th century...). Quinze-vingts
    (300) survives today only in the name of the well known hospital, "les
    Quinze-vingts", in Paris, still the best for eye therapy in France,
    which was originally founded in the 13th century by king Saint Louis IX
    to care for 300 blind people.
    
    	Just out of curiosity, do you still have the web location of this
    article? I'd like to have a look at it.
    			Denis.

	Last Tuesday was April Fools Day (at least here in the US - not sure
how wide the custom is.)  

Date: Mon, 31 Mar 1997 22:34:37 -0800
From: Jon Callas <[email protected]>
Subject: French computer systems immune to Y2K problems (via RISKS)

Date: Tue, 1 Apr 1997 0:59:59 +0100 (MET)
From: "John O'Connor" <[email protected]>
Subject: French computer systems found to be immune to Y2K problems

Paris, Tuesday, 1st of April 1997

The French Ministry of Informatics (MOI) today announced that they have
determined that French computer systems will not be affected by the year
2000 problem.  An extensive series of tests have been run on a wide range of
applications within the country and on no system has a Y2K problem been
apparent.

A spokesman put this good fortune down to a side-effect of the French number
system.  In this system the number eighty is represented by the composite
"quatre vingts" -- literally "four twenties."  French computer systems
represent the "quatre" as a single digit and will harmlessly roll over to
"cinq vingts" or "five twenties" while the rest of the world collapses.
Thus, "quatre vingts dix neuf" will increment to "cinq vingts."

French speaking areas of Belgium and Switzerland are bemused by these
developments, because they still use the older "septant, octant, nonant"
system for 70, 80, and 90.  The Belgian government is thought to be
considering an urgent change in the language.  This would provide a major
boost for the less prosperous French speaking part of the country when
computer systems are relocated to French speaking communes.

Microsoft has announced that it will use similar techniques to guarantee the
PCs will not suffer from such problems, by launching a new version of their
operating system.  "Windows ninety ten" is expected to be available in the
year 2002.

  [``MOI?'', dit Mademoiselle Petite-Couchon
  (better known here as Miss Piggy).  PGN]

    
     hmmm...	
    
    	Just offhand, there are CULTURES where it's a non-issue, but
    	because of the economic/political power base in the West,
        I think all COUNTRIES will have to deal with it.
    
    	Many places use other date-systems on their currency and their
        calanders, for example, but if you make a hotel reservation for 
        September of 1997, they will know what you are tallking about!
    
    	I got confused when wandering around the world and completing
        visa applications as to whether to use the "local year" or
        the "western european world year" when I'd get to a border where 
        the year changed  -- I noted the default became "western world"
        but either was quite acceptable.
    
     Dennis

  I think the internet article was an April Fool's joke. Even if France did
use this system for expressing numbers in words, they would still use the
standard digits for numbers. And computers use digits, not words, to store
dates. So the year-2000 problem will still occur.
  As several replies said, the Gregorian calendar is the standard for all
international applications. And my guess is that 99.9% of all computer programs
in the world that store dates use the standard calendar. Maybe a few church-
based applications (Buddhist etc.) use a different system.

    Good grief...  Yes, the article was a joke and I knew it - I
    deliberately obscured the date in my initial reply.
    
    					Steve

    Re .7: And you caught me there, Steve. It didn't occur to me to compute
    what date was Tuesday last week. But I had a good laugh reading the
    article. Thanks for posting it.
    
    	BTW, when I entered Iran in 1974 (still five years before Khomeiny
    overthrew the shah), the year in the Iranian custom stamp on my
    passport, after translating the arabic numerals in latin ones, read
    138x (I don't remember the last digit, but I can check it if anyone is
    interested). So it means that, even before the islamic republic, the
    Iranian administration was officially using the muslim calendar rather
    than the western one. Don't know if their computers use it as well, but
    it might be worth checking. And I'd expect a few other muslim states
    would do the same. In that case, they underwent the change of century
    problem about ten+ years ago (I don't remember the exact date, but if
    you remember the takeover of Mecca's great mosquea by armed
    fundamentalist terrorists who held it for about a week before being
    reduced, it was in the early year 1500 of the muslim calendar, these
    people did it then on purpose, they had some strong millenarist
    beliefs). Does anyone know if that century change caused any problem in
    muslim countries? It might be worth investigating.
    			Denis.

    Of course the Internet article was an April Fool's joke.  If nothing
    else gave it away, consider the last paragraph:
    
        "Microsoft has announced that it will use similar techniques to
        guarantee the PCs will not suffer from such problems, by launching
        a new version of their operating system.  "Windows ninety ten" is
        expected to be available in the year 2002."

It might have been already mentioned, but we use our own calender as well
as the Christian one in Japan. Months and days are the same same but the
years are counted according to the Emperor's "reign".  It's now "Heisei" 9. 
We got patches when Emperor Showa, Hirohito, passed away. The new era's
name is not be decided until the next emperor's coronation, so we 
couldn't hard-code it. After that problem the Japanese OpenVMS employed a new
logical, JSY$ERA_NAME, by which we can define the new era's name without
patches.

- Kazunori