List structure and standards making

[Dennis L. Mumaugh]

While the list has been discussing time and timezones in  context
of  the IEEE P1003 standards committee, people have lost sight of
X3J11 which is much more  important  and  further  along  towards
casting  into  concrete.  (Dramatic  effect)  As we now talk, the
concrete has been laid and is hardening. (End drama).

People  should  get  out  their  X3J11  Draft  Proposed  American
Standard for Information Systems -- Programming Language C (Dated
October  1,  1986).   This  standard  is  ALREADY  entering   the
balloting  process.  Please  turn  to  page  151  and  following:
Section 4.12 -- Date and Time.

The standard ALREADY covers clock_t, time_t, struct  tm  (without
new  strings or fields!!), clock(), time(), difftime(), mktime(),
asctime(), ctime(), gmtime(), localtime(), strftime().

Thus the current  discussions  on  the  whole  time  subject  are
rapidly  becomming  academic  as the ANSI C is already spoken and
the C standard is currently  in  the  comment  phase  --  send  a
comment  and  proposed  change  of  ruling.  The  next  phase  is
balloting and trial use.

People will be relieved in that, except for the casting (sic) into
concrete of struct tm, much is left unsaid, especially things like
timezones; except to say if timezone is  unknown  or  unsupported
return  (int)-1  in the approporiate place, and for gmtime return
NULL if the offset is unknown.  Also checkout  the  semantics  of
mktime!!

--

=Dennis L. Mumaugh
 Lisle, IL       ...!{ihnp4,cbosgd,lll-crg}!cuuxb!dlm