At 12/17/2001 06:02 PM (Monday), Ann W. Harrison wrote:

>At 05:41 PM 12/17/2001 -0500, Doug Chamberlin wrote:
>
> >Well, I don't much like magic string values which mean different things
> >depending on the context in which they appear. Smacks of a "clever coding"
> >type of thinking, to me.
>
>Without going into deep issues of taste, why is 'NOW' a magic string
>and '17 Dec 2001' is a normal date? - dates are stored as binary numbers
>after all, representing the difference between some time and some other
>time in some unit - having nothing to do with the characters '17 Dec 2001'
>For that matter, why is '123' not a magic string?

The string 'Now' is more of a magic string because it means different
things is different contexts while a date usually means the same thing
everywhere. For example, "Now is the time for all good men to come to the
aid of their country" works while "17 Dec 2001 is the time for all good men
to come to the aid of their country" does not.

Hey, I never intended to start an argument over this. I just prefer the
pre-defined identifiers.

If FB was a math package I'd like PI to be pre-defined as 3.14159... and
have a floating point type associated with it rather than using 'PI' which
has a string type associated with it. It just makes more sense to me. NBD.