Recently, Willi Kusche observed that on startup the Apple UCSD Pascal system _deleted_ any file with a date in which the year is > 99. In perusing the source to an earlier system from volume 17 of the USUS library, I see that the system uses a date of 0-0-100 as a sentinel when creating a temprorary directory entry for a new file. When the file is later closed with the LOCK option, the correct date is set. At boot time, the presence of a directory entry with year = 100 would signal a file which had not been closed in a previous session. As the default action of close is to discard the file, it is deleted. John ---- jmatthews at wright dot edu www dot wright dot edu/~john.matthews/ John B. Matthews wrote: > At boot time, the presence of a directory entry with year = 100 > would signal a file which had not been closed in a previous > session. As the default action of close is to discard the file, > it is deleted. This makes sense. One of the references I'd found noted that year==100 had a "special" meaning, though it neglected to say what that meaning was. The ProDOS 8 approach is to use year=0..39 to mean 2000..2039, while 40..99 is 1940..1999. This seems like a reasonable practice for the Pascal world. The system just shows the year as a single digit, but I'm not sure which utilities actually do date comparisons (i.e. does anything care whether it's 1904 or 2004?) -- Send mail to fadden@fadden.com (Andy McFadden) - http://www.fadden.com/ CD-Recordable FAQ - http://www.cdrfaq.org/ CiderPress Apple II archive utility for Windows - http://www.faddensoft.com/ Fight Internet Spam - http://spam.abuse.net/spam/ & http://spamcop.net/