asctime.c

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Robert Elz said:
>   | Actually %.4d would be better.

As Paul points out, this breaks with negative numbers; %04d is better.

> You'd prefer years with leading zeroes?   Why?

Because that's what "constant width" says to me.

>   | This change could, in theory, break an existing program which relied on the
>   | present specification.
> It could, but should there be any?

Why not? This started because you claimed programs were relying on the
previous specification.

> The mistake that was made here was
> in standardising asctime/ctime at all when strftime was all that was needed.

Possibly.

>   | For some value of "portable". There's "portable to all Standard C
>   | implementations" and "portable to both Standard and pre-Standard C".
> There's only one definition of "portable" that matters - if I code in
> this particular way, can I distribute my code and assume that it will
> work everywhere (here that means, everywhere there's a compiler that
> claims to compile C code).

I don't believe you can write any code that that statement is true for.

Clue: there are C compilers that don't implement printf().

> If my
> code fails on *any* implementations, it isn't portable.

I think you need to meet the real world. It doesn't work like that.

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather  | Work:  <clive at demon.net>   | Tel:    +44 20 8495 6138
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