FW: timezone improvements

Markus Kuhn Markus.Kuhn at cl.cam.ac.uk
Fri Aug 27 00:23:06 UTC 1999


"Olson, Arthur David (NCI)" quoted:
> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Robert E. Brown [SMTP:brownb at jany.gs.com]
> Sent:	Thursday, August 26, 1999 1:24 PM
> To:	tz at elsie.nci.nih.gov
> Subject:	timezone improvements
> 
> 
> I work for a company that requires some capabilities beyond the standard
> time zone library.  Here's the sort of thing we're interested in:
> 
>     Ability to efficiently do time calculations in several time zones at the
>     same time in separate threads.  Time zone functions might take a zone
>     as argument instead of the current method of setting the TZ environment
>     variable and calling tzset to change zones, which involves file I/O.
> 
> Is there any prior art along these lines?  I do see the routines whose names
> end with "_r".  They seem to fix one glitch, but do not completely solve the
> problem.

In order to completely solve this problem (and a few others), I have
taken the time to write up a proposal for a modernized date/time
interface for the C language:

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/c-time/

I hope you will find this proposal a useful reference, and I also would
expect that it suits your needs nicely. If not, please explain why!
There exist no implementation at this point yet. I would be delighted if
you would pay someone to implement it (or part of it). My hope is that
the ISO C committee will look at this issue one day, but the proposal
came too late to still go into ISO C 9X.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>




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