🚀 go-pugleaf

   From: Tim Nagle <tenagle@mmm.com>
   Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 17:04:05 -0600

   Me thinks that one would have to go out of their way to create a 
   Y2K problem in any list processor.

   Scott McKay wrote:
   >     Can anyone tell me anything about the expected Y2K status of Genera
   >     8.3??
   > 
   >     Thanks,
   >     Mike Harper

   > I bet a dollar it works well.
   > 
   > Why not set the date to Dec 31 1999 11:55 PM, then hack for a few
   > hours?  Then you can tell us all how well, or poorly, it did.

Anecdotal information follows, possibly even faulty.
Not to be relied on for Y2K insurance purposes.

My recollection is of a specific piece of mail sent by David Moon who
had turned the clock forward to test this very thing, quite a while
back, and sending e-mail from "the future".  (I recall someone asking
the usual questions about how the Red Sox were doing, though sadly if
he had anything informative to say about that, it's been lost.)

I mostly agree with Tim that Lisp is pretty hard to get into a Y2K bug
with.  The time formats Lisp itself uses are pretty good for heading
off most obvious problems, though being Turing powerful one can not
easily prove that someone won't be "clever" enough to dig a hole to
climb into.  I have much greater concern about Y4K bugs.  (I think
someone first raised this Y4K problem on comp.lang.lisp: Think about
the highest representable date in Roman numerals and how ~@R and ~@:R
will break when used with numbers bigger than 3999.  Funny that all
the troublesome dates are ones that are good for the M&M candy company
to capitalize on.  Coincidence? ... or Conspiracy? ;-)