OpenEuphoria

Re: Date Error in MS Works

• Posted by Brian Broker <bkb at CNW.COM> Feb 22, 2000
• 607 views

On Mon, 21 Feb 2000 21:14:14 -0600, Joe Otto wrote:

>1900 wasn't a leap year, but an old, old spreadsheet that ran under MSDOS
>called Lotus 123 thought that it was a leap year.  When Microsoft got into
>the spreadsheet market, they continued the error for the sake of backward
>compatibility.  Nice, huh?

So are you being sarcastic (just another anti-Microsofty) or are you
commending MS on realizing IBM's error?  I wonder how many MS spreadsheets
actually contain this user-entry error (perhaps from an imported DOS-based
Lotus 123 data file)? ... my guess, irrelevant ...

But just to play with the idea, I whipped up a command_line program for
testing...

-------------------------
include get.e

sequence cl, y
integer year, leapyear

cl = command_line()

if length( cl ) < 3 then
  puts( 1, "Usage: ly <year>\nReturns: Yes if it's a leap year..." )
  abort( 1 )
else
  y = value( cl[3] )
  if y[1] = GET_FAIL or y[1] = GET_EOF then
    puts( 1, "Usage: ly <year>\nReturns: Yes if it's a leap year..." )
    abort( 2 )
  else
    year = y[2]
  end if
end if

leapyear = ( ( remainder( year, 4 ) = 0 ) and
           ( remainder( year, 100 ) != 0 ) )
           or ( remainder( year, 400 ) = 0 )

if leapyear then
  puts( 1, "Yes, it's a leap year!" )
else
  puts( 1, "Nope, it's not a leap year." )
end if
-------------------------

-- Brian