• Kaboom@reddthat.com
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    18 hours ago

    1875 has never been an epoch anywhere, on any system. 1970 has. 1900 has. 0000 has. But 1875? No, it hasn’t. And no where in the cobol spec does 1875 appear.

    This is just propaganda. He already does enough wrong, you guys lying about it just makes everything else you say suspect.

    • manicdave@feddit.uk
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      15 hours ago

      Why is your profile picture a lemming? Nowhere in the rust spec does it say that a lemming should be the default picture. This is just propaganda.

    • Rayquetzalcoatl@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      “You guys are wrong about the epoch in COBOL and it’s really making me believe this ketamine fueled Nazi, shame on you” lol you’re ridiculous

      • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
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        7 hours ago

        I thought truth mattered right?

        …right?

        I was intrigued by this article as 1865 isn’t any epoch I’ve heard about and I didn’t think COBOL really had a concept of an epoch (an epoch matters when you’re counting milliseconds from zero, COBOL stores date/time info differently). I’ve been searching this morning and can only find the Wikipedia page mentioning that date - which is weird for an ISO standard that is 99% about date formatting.

        • Rayquetzalcoatl@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          Yeah I’ve only heard of the 1970 epoch too, I didn’t realise different languages had different epochs honestly! Interesting stuff. I’ve never worked with COBOL but my old boss was learning it a few years ago, it’s used a lot in banking right?

          • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
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            4 hours ago

            It’s used in mainframes mostly. I don’t know COBOL well but I’ve worked with COBOL systems in the past. I didn’t think it even has a “date type” (at least in older systems? maybe it was added at some point?). They just store dates as 8 digits (6 back in the day which led to infamous “y2k” problems). That’s why I didn’t think they had an epoch. In more modern systems a date is typically “the number of milliseconds since the epoch”. For Linux that’s 01/01/1970. Either way this explanation for Musk’s error is pretty sus. I’m sure he’s misunderstanding something (he didn’t think the US government used SQL ffs) though.

            Edit: It’s possible this particular team used that date as some sort of special value. That would be pretty common in older programming styles. But it doesn’t seem like it’s any sort of “standard.”

      • Kaboom@reddthat.com
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        10 hours ago

        Why not focus on the Nazi bit? Instead of lying about the 1875 bit? Are you lying about him being a Nazi?