Sean Lange (1/8/2013)
Actually I think that a negative age has some real value if you think of age not as only the age of a person. What you are calculating is the total years elapsed between two dates and if you were looking at something like project delivery dates a negative data might have some real worth. Maybe a company that works with long term deliverables like construction. It might be nice to see that something was delivered more than a year ahead of schedule. Your fine code would work for such a scenario if it included negatives.We have now seen several different approaches to the same problem. Most of them handle leap years correctly too. 😀
Going by the dictionary definition of age, "The length of time during which a being or thing has existed.", I have to say that negative age does not make much sense to me.
I tested the solutions from the other posts using the test data I posted (leaving out the negative ages), and found every one had at least one difference with the solution I posted, especially with the handling of Feb 29 birthdays, or when the time of day for CURR_DATE was before the time of day for DOB when they were both the same day of the year ( Example: DOB = 2013-01-08 16:52:54.810 and CURR_DATE = 2023-01-08 16:52:54.710 ). I believe most calculations of Age ignore time of day, so my solution is coded to ignore it.