Communicator 3000 MPE/iX Release 6.0 (Platform Software Release C.60.00) (30216-90269)

138 Chapter 9
Year 2000 Enhancements
VPLUS Enhancements for Turn-of-Century
VPLUS Enhancements for Turn-of-Century
VPLUS version B.06.07 (and later) contains enhancements to handle
the year 2000 and beyond in applications. For more detailed
information including syntax and parameters, refer to the article, "Year
2000 and Other Enhancements in VPLUS," in the chapter, "Technical
Articles."
Turn-of-century Enhancement
VPLUS version B.06.07 contains enhancements to handle Year 2000
and beyond in applications. These enhancements can be grouped into
three segments as follows:
• Intrinsic enhancements
• FORMSPEC enhancements
• Processing enhancements
Intrinsic Enhancements
Two new intrinsics have been added to VPLUS to handle dates in the
next century. These are VGETYYYYMMDD and VPUTYYYYMMDD. These
intrinsics are similar in structure and function to the existing intrinsics
VGETYYMMDD and VPUTYYMMDD respectively. The difference is that the
date values handled by the new intrinsics contain 4-digit year
components.
FORMSPEC Enhancements
FORMSPEC Application Ready Buffer (ARB) processing has been
enhanced with the addition of a new ARB data type. This data type can
be specified on the DTC Menu for Data Type Conversions from Screen
Type to Application Type. The new ARB Type is YYYYMD and is defined
as a 8-byte ASCII field containing a date value in YMD order with no
separators. Also the year component in the date value has 4 digits. Note
that FORMSPEC will ensure a length of 8 for the data type YYYYMD in
the ARB. In essence, the value is of the form YYYYMMDD (8 bytes) even
though the Type designator on the DTC Menu has been abbreviated to
YYYYMD.
Processing Enhancements
Date processing in VPLUS has been enhanced to handle date values
with 4-digit year components. Specifically, the following additions have
been made.