Day of week routine

[Robert J Woodhead]

In article <107107 at sun.Eng.Sun.COM> jamesa at arabian.Sun.COM (James D. Allen) writes:
>In article <1989May29.232954.25638 at utzoo.uucp>, henry at utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>> The mind boggles at how many programs had to be fixed to know about the
>> new year numbering...
>
>Are you sure?  Even the most loyal of Japanese programmers should have
>anticipated outliving the aging emperor.

Well, for many computer tasks the Japanese use the gregorian calendar.  When
Hirohito died and the name of the new era (Heisei) was announced, those
machines (most notably, bank machines) all had to have their date routines
updated.  The hooks were already there; in most cases it involved setting
a table entry to indicate that 1989 was year 1 of the new era and another
entry giving the kanji characters for Heisei.

As a matter of note, all of the ticket printing machines in Tokyo subways,
which use the Japanese dating system, changed over flawlessly.

The major expense was reprinting all the government documents, calendars, etc.
This, and not the Recruit scandal, was what really brought down the Takeshita
government.  Seems that they hadn't set aside enough bribe money to pay for
the new calendars, and...

-- 
Robert J Woodhead, Biar Games, Inc.  !uunet!biar!trebor | trebor at biar.UUCP
``The worst thing about being a vampire is that you can't go to matinees
  and save money anymore.''