Re: INTEGER-OF-DATE

No, INTEGER-OF-DATE is not a date validation checker.

It returns the integer value of a date, which is extremely useful when
calculating the elapsed number of days between two dates.

The integer value of the date returned by the INTEGER-OF-DATE function
is defined as "the number of days by which the date represented by
argument-1 succeeds December 31, 1600, in the Gregorian calendar."

Using MF Cobol (both OCDS and Server Express) you get a return value of
0 if you pass the function an invalid date. So, in this sense, you
could infact use INTEGER-OF-DATE to tell whether or not you've entered
a valid date. In fact, I've often added a redundant check using the
DATE-OF-INTEGER function to make sure I get back the same value I
started with to absolutely insure that the starting date is indeed
valid.

However, I am not 100% sure whether the result of passing an invalid
date to the INTEGER-OF-DATE function is compiler dependent - you might
want to check into that.

Chris

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