Users reported date intrinsic breakage in PowerPatch 5 Customers began reporting the intrinsic HPDATEDIFF, one of the new ones introduced last year, stopped working correctly as of PowerPatch 5. NewsWire subscriber Steve Dirickson noted that “We discovered this after updating to PP5 over the weekend. After rebuilding some modules for testing, the ‘is your password expired?’ logic (written in Transact/iX) started returning a failed status 100 percent of the time. It looks to me like: 1) HPDATEDIFF is only returning 16 bits of the status parameter, and the “wrong” 16 bits at that — i.e. the ‘.subsys’ member. It does not appear to be returning a misaligned 32 bits, since none of the guard values were changed. 2) It looks like it is also mis-reading the input, since a change in the ‘.info’ member of the output-status parameter on input causes a change in the returned status value.” Others confirmed the breakage, then pointed to a patch that may fix it. Subscriber Gilles Schipper reported that “Patch MPEKXB5A was general-released on Aug. 12. PowerPatch 5 was released on Aug. 11, which I actually received Aug. 12 and installed a couple of days later.” One developer who is already running a pre-release version of MPE/iX 6.0 said the HPDATEDIFF intrinsic was working correctly in 6.0. Copyright 1998 The 3000 NewsWire. All rights reserved