Serious Pascal help needed

[a2mg@aol.com (A2MG)]

To anyone who is familiar with Apple Pascal:

The following is a message which will appear in tomorrow's mail group. I am
posting it here in the hope that someone who knows Apple Pascal can help us.

The problem is the Year 2000 update for Quicken. Quicken rejects years earlier
than 68 when it is entered as the date of a check. Enter 00 as the year, and an
annoying error message pops up. A few of us have been looking at this for
several months, with little progress. 

So far, we have been able to allow the data entry of the year 00 by filtering
out what appears to be a GOTO near the place where the annoying error message
is in the code. However, the program doesn't implement it. Instead, it takes on
a year like 70 or 72 or some other residue. So we are filtering out not only
the less than 68 code (which is good), but we are also prohibiting the posting
in memory of the entire date (which is bad). Close, but no cigar.

This is the ProDos version of Quicken, but except for the startup System file,
most of the code is in text files. We think it is Pascal, but we are not sure.
Obviously, it is not Assembly language. 

We do not know how they transfer the Pascal code to a ProDos scenario. However,
that is not important. All we need is to locate that 68. We have already tried
various searches like $44 C9, and every possible combination thereof.

We do not have source code. We are looking at it with Block Warden.

The Mail Group message, and my tentative reply, follows. If you have any
knowledge on this subject which might help us, please let us know. Thank you.

From:  
Subj:  Quicken 2000

Hi Bev,

Any luck with regards to getting Quicken up to Y2K speed?  I figure I would
have heard something if that was the case, but I was just checking.

I had a thought and wanted to run it by you.....

I'm really upset that I may have to move to another computer if Quicken can't
be updated before next year.  I have all my business and personal accounts on
it, and have for many years.  Moving over would not only be a pain, I'd have to
consider leaving the Apple II world altogether at that point.

I'd be willing to put up some money (hopefully along with some other Quicken
users) in order to get this program updated.  I don't know anything about
Pascal or what's involved time-wise to get this done, but maybe if we paid
someone there would be some interest in doing the job.

Thoughts?

From: Beverly Cadieux

I still look at Quicken from time to time, but every time it's a dead end. Jim
Nichol has also spent a great deal of time on it. Did you follow our
conversation on Compuserve with Jason Harper, who was giving us Pascal codes
(which Jim had figured out, too)? 

Your best bet is to search the web for someone who is real familiar with Apple
Pascal (remember, we are not even sure that Quicken IS in Pascal).  All we need
to know is how a comparison with the year 68, 6, 8, (or 67, 6, or 7) would be
made. 

Since the Quicken program has a whole date scenario, and can reject dates like
Sept 31 and Feb 30 (including allowing a day of Feb 29 in a leap year only),
this "date-rejection" routine must be a huge section of the program. We just
don't know where this routine is. If we had some idea what the code would look
like, we could probably find it. Obviously, it is not a simple "CMP 68," or we
would have fixed it by now.

Beverly Cadieux


Beverly Cadieux 
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