Re: DAY Number in an Year

In article <1127957350.272566.191140@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<prasad413in@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> IF(DAY_NO .GT. 365) THEN CURRENT_YEAR = YEAR+1 ??????????
>It should be a real time run..

Someone in a certain aluminium smelting company wrote code like that
(I don't know if it was in Fortran) and caused damage costing millions
to repair, because the New Zealand potlines turned themselves off
suddenly at midnight on 30 Dec 1996. Exactly 2 hours later the same
thing happened in Tasmania. More millions gone. But then someone
realised that 1996 had 366 days, and was able to prevent the same
problem hitting the same company's smelter in Queensland 1 hour later.
They were very glad that Qld does not put its clocks forward in summer!
Otherwise the Tas and Qld smelters would have gone down simultaneously.

John Harper, School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science,
Victoria University, PO Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand
e-mail john.harper@xxxxxxxxx phone (+64)(4)463 5341 fax (+64)(4)463 5045

.