20000217: 7 digit dates in McBASI and BATCH files

>From: Bill Fingerhut <address@hidden>
>Organization: Lyndon State College
>Keywords: 200002171441.HAA13883 McIDAS McBASI CCYYDDD

Bill,

>When working with the new 7 digit date, in both BATCH 
>and mcb scripts, I have run into problems as
>illustrated below. Seven digit numbers are written
>in scientific notation, not as an integer. 
>
>ECHO #SYS(2036)     ---> appears as
>ECHO 2000048
>
>However,
>
>RUN "KEYIN "ECHO ";KSYS(2036) 
>ECHO .200005E+07
>                                                                              
>RUN "KEYIN "ECHO ";KSYS$(2036) 
>ECHO  
>
>I can work around this in BATCH files. But, I can not
>use the KSYS function in mcbasi. Any ideas?

This is a known problem at SSEC for which there is not yet a fix.  Here
is what they provided as a workaround to a user who asked the same
question:

  If you are not doing any math with the day value, we think you could
  just pass the date as a character string into your keyin.

  In your keyin, change the DAY= input to a character string (a$, b$,
  etc.).

  Since McIDAS ADDE commands accept the 5 or 7 digit dates, it should
  befine if you use the 5 digit Julian date in the DAY= keyword. In 7.5
  or 7.6, you can get the 5 digit julian day as a numeric with this
  expression:

  LET D=VAL(MID$(DATE$,3,5))

  The MID$ strips the CC off the front of the julian day and the VAL
  makes it numeric. Then you can pass D into the DAY= keyword.

  If you are using older commands (e.g. SC or UP), and you need the
  7 digit day passed to a command, you can create the 7 digit day
  by referencing the system key table:

  d  = ksys(2013)
  a$ = str$(int(d/1000)) + mid$(mod(d,1000)+1000,2,3)

  Tom Whittaker thought this one up, and with it you could use a$ for
  the 7 digit date.

They then finished with:

  If neither of these work, send us an example of your McBASI script,
  and we can come up with a work-around.

I will echo this.  If nothing in the above helps, send me a script so
I can see if I can figure something out.

Tom