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Symbolic gesture aims to help citizens sleep. Next: Doing something about people who walk while using their phones

The city council in the Japanese city of Toyoake has passed an ordinance that symbolically limits recreational use of smartphones to just two hours each day.…

Several moms have gone viral on TikTok for posting videos of themselves chugging Tylenol in protest against Trump's latest advice.

Redmond suggests ‘Microfluidics’ – hair-thin channels etched on silicon to let coolants flow

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British relationship expert Tracey Cox speaks to one woman who says she regrets marrying down and why.

Dani Dyer has broken her silence after being forced to pull out of Strictly Come Dancing just days before the first live show after fracturing her ankle in a fall

Mia Savage, then 17, (pictured) was sat in the front passenger seat when her brothers Henry Taylor and Harrison Taylor crashed their cars speeding around Poole Harbour, Dorset.

Passengers who arrived at Stansted Airport this morning were evacuated due to a fire in the escape lounge which has led to delays.

We're going to start with the code, and then talk about it. You've seen it before, you know the chorus: bad date handling:

C_DATE($1) C_STRING(7;$0) C_STRING(3;$currentMonth) C_STRING(2;$currentDay;$currentYear) C_INTEGER($month) $currentDay:=String(Day of($1)) $currentDay:=Change string("00";$currentDay;3-Length($currentDay)) $month:=Month of($1) Case of : ($month=1) $currentMonth:="JAN" : ($month=2) $currentMonth:="FEB" : ($month=3) $currentMonth:="MAR" : ($month=4) $currentMonth:="APR" : ($month=5) $currentMonth:="MAY" : ($month=6) $currentMonth:="JUN" : ($month=7) $currentMonth:="JUL" : ($month=8) $currentMonth:="AUG" : ($month=9) $currentMonth:="SEP" : ($month=10) $currentMonth:="OCT" : ($month=11) $currentMonth:="NOV" : ($month=12) $currentMonth:="DEC" End case $currentYear:=Substring(String(Year of($1));3;2) $0:=$currentDay+$currentMonth+$currentYear

At this point, most of you are asking "what the hell is that?" Well, that's Brewster's contribution to the site, and be ready to be shocked: the code you're looking at isn't the WTF in this story.

Let's rewind to 1984. Every public space was covered with a thin layer of tobacco tar. The Ground Round restaurant chain would sell children's meals based on the weight of the child and have magicians going from table to table during the meal. And nobody quite figured out exactly how relational databases were going to factor into the future, especially because in 1984, the future was on the desktop, not the big iron "server side".

Thus was born "Silver Surfer", which changed its name to "4th Dimension", or 4D. 4D was an RDBMS, an IDE, and a custom programming language. That language is what you see above. Originally, they developed on Apple hardware, and were almost published directly by Apple, but "other vendors" (like FileMaker) were concerned that Apple having a "brand" database would hurt their businesses, and pressured Apple- who at the time was very dependent on its software vendors to keep its ecosystem viable. In 1993, 4D added a server/client deployment. In 1995, it went cross platform and started working on Windows. By 1997 it supported building web applications.

All in all, 4D seems to always have been a step or two behind. It released a few years after FileMaker, which served a similar niche. It moved to Windows a few years after Access was released. It added web support a few years after tools like Cold Fusion (yes, I know) and PHP (I absolutely know) started to make building data-driven web apps more accessible. It started supporting Service Oriented Architectures in 2004, which is probably as close to "on time" as it ever got for shipping a feature based on market demands.

4D still sees infrequent releases. It supports SQL (as of 2008), and PHP (as of 2010). The company behind it still exists. It still ships, and people- like Brewster- still ship applications using it. Which brings us all the way back around to the terrible date handling code.

4D does have a "date display" function, which formats dates. But it only supports a handful of output formats, at least in the version Brewster is using. Which means if you want DD-MMM-YYYY (24-SEP-2025) you have to build it yourself.

Which is what we see above. The rare case where bad date handling isn't inherently the WTF; the absence of good date handling in the available tooling is.

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I plan to leave them an inheritance, but perhaps more importantly I want to teach them to make good financial decisions on their own.

We reveal five 'mind-trick' savings habits, as coined by This is Money, to get you to build up a pot of savings without even realising you are doing it.

OECD forecasts underlined Britain's deepening cost of living crisis - with the highest inflation in the G7 - and sluggish economic growth.

Rachel Reeves' decision to hike employer national insurance has piled the pain on businesses struggling to grow by making it more expensive to hire workers.

Local groups such as youth football teams are likely to get a funding boost

The 22-year-old Swedish eco-protestor has also reportedly left her leadership role due to disagreements among organisers, but she will stay on board as a participant volunteer.

Margot Robbie has been making headlines in recent weeks as she flaunts her figure in racy gowns on the red carpet while promoting her latest romance film. 

Gigi Hadid made a rare remark about ex-boyfriend Zayn Malik, with whom she shares daughter Khai.

The family of 14-year-old influencer Zuza Beine announced her death after more than a decade battling leukemia. Zuza documented her final years with cancer on Instagram and TikTok .

Council proposing to restrict activity which is 'having a detrimental effect on the quality of life of those across district'

The ex-wife of Brad Pitt told People there are many 'comfort foods' in her new book Cooking With Clydeo, which was released on September 9, that she whips up when she has a hankering.

Trump accused ABC of deceit before promising to 'test' them out on the move ahead of Kimmel's first show back on Tuesday night.