URL:         http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes/vim/y2k.html
URL:         https://www.vim8.org/y2k.html (mirror)
Created:     Fri Jan 01 00:00:00 CET 1999
Last update: Thu Nov 25 12:00:00 MET 1999

VIM and Y2K compliancy

Yes, Vim is Y2K compliant. :-)

Here is the info provided in the documentation:

:help year-2000

Since Vim internally doesn't use dates, there is no year 2000 problem.
There might be a year 2038 problem, when the seconds since January 1st 1970
don't fit in a 32 bit int[eger] anymore.  This depends on the compiler,
libraries and operating system.  Specifically, time_t and the ctime() function
are used.  And the time_t is stored in four bytes in the swap file.
But that's only used for printing a file date/time for recovery.
The Vim strftime() function directly uses the strftime() system function.
If your system libraries are year 2000 compliant, Vim is too.

On 990521 I had received a FAX from a company asking me to give a Y2K evaluation of *all* versions of Vim together with a note that the URL of a webpage is not enough to satisfy their legal requirements.

Well, we might say that "any damages can only be refunded as far as they do not exceed the price paid for the product". Since Vim is available for free such a statement doesn't mean anything, does it? ;-)

Anyway, the author of Vim cannot possibly take responsibility for other people's environments in which they compile and use Vim. Therefore we cannot give a guarantee.

Furthermore, a written statement has legal implications which the developers cannot fully oversee. Therefore we will not send away letters or faxes.

You will simply have to believe that all the developers have done all the best they can to prevent Vim from crashing in any way. And if you are in doubt, well, you can check the code yourself. :-)

Personally, I wonder why the industry suddenly cares so much about bugs *now*. After all, software had always had bugs before and will probably have in future. "Does anybody care what time it is" when you lose your data?

Why has noone ever asked for such statements about other kinds of bugs, eg a "Macintosh guarantee for dialogs to be without any bomb icons"? And how about an "insurance for Unix segmentation faults"? I would really look forward to see a guarantee from Microsoft that I would never have to use control-alt-delete ever again...

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Sven Guckes [email protected]