From owner-freebsd-chat Tue Jan 18 9:59:16 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from smtp02.primenet.com (smtp02.primenet.com [206.165.6.132]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9D7C014CA6; Tue, 18 Jan 2000 09:58:56 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from tlambert@usr08.primenet.com) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by smtp02.primenet.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id KAA07091; Tue, 18 Jan 2000 10:54:06 -0700 (MST) Received: from usr08.primenet.com(206.165.6.208) via SMTP by smtp02.primenet.com, id smtpdAAAbMaqSn; Tue Jan 18 10:53:54 2000 Received: (from tlambert@localhost) by usr08.primenet.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id KAA07986; Tue, 18 Jan 2000 10:58:15 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <200001181758.KAA07986@usr08.primenet.com> Subject: Re: time_t (was Re: I will never trust NBC news again!) To: andrews@TECHNOLOGIST.COM Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 17:58:14 +0000 (GMT) Cc: oogali@intranova.net (Omachonu Ogali), chat@FreeBSD.ORG, eivind@FreeBSD.ORG (Eivind Eklund), mph@astro.caltech.edu (Matthew Hunt) In-Reply-To: from "Will Andrews" at Jan 16, 2000 03:02:38 PM X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL2] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > > Why isn't it and why can't it be? > > Historical reasons. You're asking the entire computer industry > to change the standard libraries' use of the time_t typedef. > time_t starts on January 1, 1970 at 00:00 UTC. People who need > dates before that can write their own timekeeping libraries > that can easily "drop in" for their C libraries. > > Banks, crime depts, etc. are only a small portion of the "computer > user" legion. It would be a completely ridiculous idea to change > time_t everywhere. I would predict chaos, quite frankly. time_t is a signed value. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message