Number of days in a month in any given year...

[Paul Overway]

Yes...DateSerial has the purpose of building a date....a VALID date.
February 29 is not a valid date for any year other leap years. So, while
DateSerial's primary purpose is to build a valid date, it has a secondary
purpose of determining whether the date falls in a leap year. It IS
designed to determine whether or not a date falls in a leap year.

In any case, there is a cost to your reasoning. And I say again, you're
goldplating (specifying unneeded functionality or feaures solely for the
sake of appearance). I certainly wouldn't want you working on any project
for me using that reasoning.

 

[David C. Holley]

There is never an excuse not to have SOLID and well-defined business
requirements.

 

[Paul Overway]

Excuses? No, just facts. You're wasting your time, and more importantly,
the time/money of whoever the stake holder is for your project. Good luck
keeping a job.

 

[David C. Holley]

I will NEVER apologize for advocating clearly defined business
requirements.

 

[David C. Holley]

As a project proceeds from requirements to design to testing, if a
requirement is discovered to be missing or is discovered to be badly
written, the cost to fix the problem increases exponentially as the
project reaches completion. In other words, its a lot cheaper to
discover a problem with a requirement while the project is nothing more
than a list of requirements than when the project is in user-acceptance
testing. There is direct financial impact to well-definded requirements
at the one-set.

 

[Paul Overway]

You're not telling me anything new there. The problem I have with your
requirements definition is that it appears you want to define design. Your
methodology in writing requirements can be just as costly, and I suspect
often times more costly than allowing the developer latitude in how a
feature will be designed and implemented. For example, you specify that a
feature must be designed in a certain way...the developer may know of a less
costly design that accomplishes the same objective...likewise, in respect to
requirements that affect performance. Requirements should be a broad
outline of features and functions with design SUGGESTIONS, if ambiguity in
the design would cause issues later in development or use. You're
specifying the design in your requirements....that is the developer's job.

In this specific case, you're telling the developer that he must write a
custom function vs using built-in language features that accomplish the same
goal. The difference in cost is 5 ~ 10 minutes to write and test vs .5 ~ 1
hour. If your methods are applied throughout the project, the costs are
inflated way beyond reason.

 

[Tim Ferguson]

That I like.

Eeehh -- I can still remember those Pascal and C lessons...

'Course, if you try to tell the young ones nowadays, they won't believe
you!

All the best


Tim F

 

[David C. Holley]

Did you ever have to work with a mission-critical 3rd party application
that was written in French Pascal?

 

[Tim Ferguson]

Did you ever have to work with a mission-critical 3rd party application
that was written in French Pascal?

Although my MSc was pretty critical at the time, all the code was mine.
Just to suggest that any of my course material was supplied by a third
party... humph!

Anyway, I don't really believe in programming, but I am going to learn how
to do it just in case.


All the best


Tim F

 

[David C. Holley]

Its probably a good thing that you don't believe in programming simply
because I don't believe that faith in programming will save your soul.

 

[Larry Linson]

Its probably a good thing that you
don't believe in programming simply
because I don't believe that faith in
programming will save your soul.

Well, I have seen some good programming save a few peoples' hides over the
years. Would that suffice?

In fact, except for the "programming" involved in Scientology, I don't
recall any religious connotation.

 

[David C. Holley]

Actually I personally believe that a little 'programming' didn't harm
anybody.

 

[Guest]

Wow,

fLeapYear = (y mod 4)=0 and ((y mod 100)>0 or (y mod 400)=0)
Hope that helps
Tim F

...that was nice!