Robert,

With the prices of both hard disks and cycles these days, that is a "solution" whose time has reached its limit.

It is much similar thinking which gave us the Y2K problem in the first place.

Jim N

========

True, but I find it interesting - if you're a purist you can view it as a further extension of normalisation: the integer reference can be thought of as a foreign key into a (virtual) table of dates...rationalisation or what! :-))