C++: A Dialog Programming with the C++ Standard Library

Adding Expiration Dates

Now we want to add one wrinkle to this algorithm: handling items that have expiration dates. This actually applies to a fair number of items in a typical grocery store, including dairy products, meats, and even dry cereals. To keep things as simple as possible, we'll assume that whenever we buy a batch of some item with an expiration date, all of the items of that type have the same date. When we get to the expiration date of a given StockItem, we send back all of the items and reorder as though we had no items in stock.

The first question is how we store the expiration date. My first inclination was to use an unsigned short to store each date as a number representing the number of days from (for example) January 1, 2000, ...