strftime %y and negative years

[James R. Van Zandt]

 "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net> writes:
>The glibc and OpenBSD behaviours appear to be using the % operator. This is
>defined by:
>
>    the expression (a/b)*b + a%b shall equal a.
>
>If b is positive (here, it's 100) and a is negative, there are two
>possibilities in C90:
>
>(1) a/b rounds towards zero (this is required in C99) and a%b is negative.
>    This is what OpenBSD appears to be doing, with a = tm_year - 1900.
>(2) a/b rounds towards more negative numbers and a%b is positive. This is
>    actually the behaviour I prefer, but regrettably it's not available
>    in a simple way in C99. This is what glibc is doing.

I agree with your preference.  In fact, I have never found an
application for (1).  I expect the only reason (2) was ever accepted is
that it's easy to implement with common hardware.  There used to be a
lot of lame floating point implementations around for the same reason.
It's a really poor reason for standardizing on (2), though.

     - Jim Van Zandt