Year 2000 (Y2K) Compliance:

Even though the year 2000 has passed, we still like to explained how WinPCS will tackle this problem that stems largely from using two digit years to store dates, so that when "00" is used to represent the Year 2000 an so fourth. Some systems may still misinterpret date as dates related to 1900.

The date conversion functions from date to Julian Day number and the reverse base themselves on the Gregorian Calendar for all dates later than 15 October 1582; in which years divisible by 4, unless they are century years not divisible by 400, are leap years.

This particular day-numbering scheme was invented in 1583 by Joseph Justus Scaliger, and is used today directly by astronomers. The conversion algorithms used in WinPCS have astronomical scope` in the sense that they work properly over thousands of years. 

For WinPCS' purposes, this enormous range is not really needed, but it does put to rest any concerns about any special dates that may cause systems to malfunction. Using the linear day-numbering also simplifies all sorts of day and period calculations.

No expectations are made about the numbers of days between any two dates, whenever this is of interest, the system calculates the Julian Day numbers of the two dates in question and finds the difference between them.

WinPCS also uses a system of week numbers, which are six-digit strings with the first four being the year, and the last two are the number of that week in the year. The Julian Day numbering lies behind this as well, since Julian day numbers are dividable by 7 once a week, on Mondays.

Each week in WinPCS is reckoned from Monday to Sunday. Functions exist to properly add and subtract these. These function calculates the Julian Day number of the Monday in the weeks of interest and uses them to find offsets or differences.

One issue is necessary to be aware of: WinPCS formats the date as specified in Windows (INI or registry) and this may be different between systems. Text data in reports containing dates do not sort properly unless in the order year-month-day, which works fine in the U.S. but hardly anywhere else. 

Finally, the system that WinPCS runs on, must provide WinPCS with the proper date so that WinPCS activities have correct input. But given correct input, there is no design decisions causing shortcomings in WinPCS that should preclude it from handling dates properly in the future.

Why is WinPCS compatible to handles dates in the year 2000?

Since it's first release in 1990, WinPCS was designed to be Year 2000 compatible by storing and retrieving dates as four digit years. 

WinPCS stores dates as 4 bytes in the tables. Two bytes are used for the full year, for a range from 1-32767; one for the month 1-12 and one for the date 1-31.

Year number 0 is not used. The value N/A is encoded as January 14, 0, and may only be entered by typing or importing the string N/A.

Other Year 0 dates show as blank. No other year, day, or month number is given any special significance, except that as Year 0 does not exist, null dates show in the year 65535, which is interpreted as year 1 BC.

On input, if the date conversion function sees a blank string for the year, the date field is set to blank. If the year input is one or two digits, 0-9, 00-99, the year is expected to fall between 1990 and 2089. If the year input is three digits or more, even with leading zeros, the year is taken at face value. Year 000 translates into year 65535 (really year -1, or 1 BC) in these cases.

If any number less than 100 for the year, including zero, that is, from 0 to 99 inclusive; is found, the resulting year is placed in the range 1990-2089. Any year numbers greater than 100 are taken as that year. The choice of the range 1990-2089 was made based on the scope of use of WinPCS by our customers.

Input year Taken as, and stored as: