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CodeSOD: Across the 4th Dimension

The Daily WTF
3 weeks 6 days ago

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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Remy Porter