Re: Getting current date and time

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On Jul 24, 1:53 am, Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homep...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 23 Lip, 23:43, Adam Beneschan <a...@irvine.com> wrote:
>
> > In Ada 2005, this is handled by the Differences procedure in
> > Ada.Calendar.Arithmetic (9.6.1).  You can use Ada.Calendar.Time_Of to
> > create the Time value for January 1, 1970, and then use that as a
> > parameter to Differences.
>
> The problem is that I need just a number of seconds (this is for
> interfacing with other software which uses that Unix-like time
> descriptions), so I cannot use the value which is broken down into
> several components.

Why not?  Differences returns the result in "days" and "seconds", and
you should be able to convert the "days" to seconds by multiplying it
by a value that I just recently helped my 9-year-old figure out, and
then adding the result to the second value, and then maybe adding the
leap seconds (see below).

> Moreover, the concept of leap seconds does not fit here neither (or
> does it?).

Your previous post said that the purpose was to "interfac[e] with
other software which uses that Unix-like time descriptions".  I don't
think we can answer anything else without knowing just what that other
software does.  If the other software uses seconds since January 1,
1970 (regardless of what OS you're on), then you should use the method
I described, and you should either use or not use the leap seconds
depending on whether the other software does or doesn't.  If the other
software uses the Unix time function on Unix but some other system
service on other OS's, you should probably just do whatever the other
software does.  This one really isn't an Ada problem.  We could
conceivably propose a new addition to Ada.Calendar.Arithmetic:

function
Return_Current_Time_However_The_Other_Software_Maciej_Is_Using_Does_It;

but I sort of doubt that a proposal like that would be accepted.

                          -- Adam