The leap year problem

van Deursen, Arie

A significant number of programs incorrectly treats the year 2000 as a non-leap year. We list 21 real life code fragments illustrating the large variety of ways that are used to determine whether a given year is a leap year or not. Some of these fragments are correct; others will fail in the year 2000. The fragments are written in C, Pascal, COBOL, and assembly language. We discuss the consequences for automated tool support, as well as the organizational implications of the leap year problem.

Additional Metadata
ACM	Design Tools and Techniques (acm D.2.2), Coding Tools and Techniques (acm D.2.3), Distribution, Maintenance, and Enhancement (acm D.2.7), Processors (acm D.3.4), Specifying and Verifying and Reasoning about Programs (acm F.3.1), Automatic Programming (acm I.2.2)
THEME	Software (theme 1)
Publisher	CWI
Series	Software Engineering [SEN]
Organisation	Software Analysis and Transformation
Citation APA Style AAA Style APA Style Cell Style Chicago Style Harvard Style IEEE Style MLA Style Nature Style Vancouver Style American-Institute-of-Physics Style Council-of-Science-Editors Style BibTex Format Endnote Format RIS Format CSL Format DOIs only Format	van Deursen, A. (1998). The leap year problem. Software Engineering [SEN]. CWI.

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