Dumb questions about GMT offset in tm structure

seismo!nbires!vianet!devine seismo!nbires!vianet!devine
Thu Mar 19 19:31:55 UTC 1987


Someone wrote:
> Yes, but nothing in a UNIX system happened in the 19th century.
> Non-UNIX systems lacking "time_t" have done quite well dealing with
> times; I don't see any need to use "time_t" for every kind of
> timestamp any application could possibly want.

Mark replied:
! Sorry, but I disagree.  UNIX provides some very nice date/time
! manipulation routines, [...].  I had to reinvent this wheel, and
! I swiped code from ctime like crazy.  I wound up choosing ISO time
! (char string) as my standard format.

  While Unix does not need dates before 1970, I agree it should be more
flexible.  In order to provide a consistent time format for a network of
heterogeneous machines that had time epochs != 1/1/70, I too used the ISO
format for dates and times.  I didn't have to go as far as Mark did because
only network programs (that cared) used the new date/time format; existing
programs used OS-dependent calls.  Pre-epoch dates were a pain...

Bob Devine




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