The Microsoft's OOXML Leap Year Bug of 1900 is being attacked by a group of babies born on leap years, such as today 29 February:
Peter Brouwer, a spokesman for the Honor Society, says he's not surprised by the Invalid birth date bug, “Many Americans don't understand leap year – so why should the Internet?” Brouwer doesn't want to see a repeat of the leap year bug, which has taken over 20 years to correct. “In that bug, 1900 was counted as a leap year, even though it was not a leap year. Only recently has there been an agreement to fix the bug, when an international standards organization got involved. Brouwer says “We would be very proud if everyone used our software to fix their leap year bugs.“
What the press release does not tell us is if the 1900 bug is still in the OOXML specification after the BRM. I guess the leap year is still in the standard after the BRM because standards needs to be tailored for a large dominant vendor. And the argument might be that you need backward compatibility with millions of legacy binary document formats produced by Lotus-123:
In announcing its new perl script, the Society also took a swipe at Microsoft Excel. The world's most popular spreadsheet still fails to realize that 1900 is not a leap year. "That bug has been around for 20 years," Brouwer says. "Microsoft has always claimed that it's there to provide backwards compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3.
"But I've spoken to Mitch Kapor, who built Lotus 1-2-3, and he said 'Oh no, we never had a bug like that.'"
It should be said that Microsoft recently committed to fixing this bug. But Brouwer is still annoyed. "Microsoft tried to squeeze their bug into the OOXML standard, and IBM said 'You can't put that in here.' And Microsoft said 'But that bug has been in our software for 20 years, it has to be in the standard.'"
All that said, Brouwer and the rest of the international Honor Society of Leap Year Day Babies "would be very proud" if Microsoft used its perl script to finally put an end to Excel's egregious leap-year-that-isn't.
If you're reading, Steve, you can find the software here.
Use Perl!
