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Date:      Mon, 18 May 1998 22:41:26 -0400 (EDT)
From:      "Stephen J. Roznowski" <sjr@home.net>
To:        dnelson@emsphone.com, questions@FreeBSD.ORG, dnelson@emsphone.com
Subject:   Re: Year 2000
Message-ID:  <199805190241.WAA09248@istari.home.net>
In-Reply-To: Mail from 'Dan Nelson <dnelson@emsphone.com>' dated: Thu, 14 May 1998 22:33:58 -0500

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> From: Dan Nelson <dnelson@emsphone.com>
> 
> Unfortunately,
> 
> http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xsh/strptime.html
> 
> requires that 69-99 refer to 19xx and 00-68 refer to 20xx.  I don't
> like it either, mainly because any date printed as a 2-sigit number is
> *much* more likely to be in the 1900-1999 range.  Birthdates, contract
> start dates, etc etc.

This seems "wrong". The first part of the opengroup definition and
the FreeBSD definition seem to imply the following:

	"%y is the year within century."

	'Today' - "11/22/02" => 11/22/1902
	'2000+' - "11/22/02" => 11/22/2002

which seems equally bad.

I don't understand who the Open Group is, and what is the avenue for
requesting a change to Unix V2 specification?

I'd vote for amending the strptime(3) man page to include:

	BUGS

	The results of using the %y construct are imprecise since
	the century is not specified. It is recommended that
	programmers use the %Y construct.

-SR


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