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The following information about Perl and the year 2000 is a modified
version of the information that can be found in the Frequently Asked
Question (FAQ) documents.
Does Perl have a year 2000 problem? Is Perl Y2K compliant?
Short answer: No, Perl does not have a year 2000 problem. Yes,
Perl is Y2K compliant (whatever that means). The
programmers you've hired to use it, however, probably are
not. If you want perl to complain when your programmers
create programs with certain types of possible year 2000
problems, a build option allows you to turn on warnings.
Long answer: The question belies a true understanding of the
issue. Perl is just as Y2K compliant as your pencil
--no more, and no less. Can you use your pencil to write
a non-Y2K-compliant memo? Of course you can. Is that
the pencil's fault? Of course it isn't.
The date and time functions supplied with perl (gmtime and
localtime) supply adequate information to determine the
year well beyond 2000 (2038 is when trouble strikes for
32-bit machines). The year returned by these functions
when used in a list context is the year minus 1900. For
years between 1910 and 1999 this happens to be a 2-digit
decimal number. To avoid the year 2000 problem simply do
not treat the year as a 2-digit number. It isn't.
When gmtime() and localtime() are used in scalar context
they return a timestamp string that contains a fully-
expanded year. For example, $timestamp =
gmtime(1005613200) sets $timestamp to "Tue Nov 13 01:00:00
2001". There's no year 2000 problem here.
That doesn't mean that Perl can't be used to create non-
Y2K compliant programs. It can. But so can your pencil.
It's the fault of the user, not the language. At the risk
of inflaming the NRA: ``Perl doesn't break Y2K, people
do.'' See http://language.perl.com/news/y2k.html for a
longer exposition.
If you want perl to warn you when it sees a program which
catenates a number with the string "19" -- a common
indication of a year 2000 problem -- build perl using the
Configure option "-Accflags=-DPERL_Y2KWARN".
(See the file INSTALL for more information about building
perl.)
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