The year before the year 1

Paul Eggert eggert at CS.UCLA.EDU
Thu Aug 19 22:51:18 UTC 2004


"Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI)" <olsona at dc37a.nci.nih.gov> writes:

> it's a localtime/gmtime issue (how to set the value of tm_year for
> given time_t inputs). In any event...can you point me at chapter on
> verse from the C standard on this?

The C standard says that the semantics of tm_year is "years since
1900".  It gives no normal range limit (unlike other members like
tm_mon, where it lists a normal range limit of [0,11]), so presumably
the valid values for tm_year are INT_MIN..INT_MAX.

However, the standard has no explicit statement that tm_year == -1
stands for 1899, and I guess that one could argue that the word
"since" implies a nonnegative value and that the behavior is undefined
when tm_year is negative.  However, I don't know of any implementation
where -1 stands for anything other than 1899 (the only obvious value).
If we assume this, then -2 stands for 1898, ..., -1899 stands for the
year 1, and -1900 stands for the year 0 (or the year 1 B.C., if you
prefer the Venerable Bede's notation).  This is true on all
implementations that I know of, at least as far as localtime/gmtime
goes (typically on 64-bit hosts).

For strftime the issue is not so clear: please see my next message.



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