Re: Y21C Bug :-)

[Charles Hixson <charleshixsn@earthlink.net>]

Smiley?  Well...  I'm not too serious about this...

Conversion from floats would be a bit of a hassle.  But it does
accurately reflect the fact that dates further from the "center" are
known less accurately.

Still, as Kieth Thompson points out, for less work and not much more
storage one could use a 128 bit fixed number, which would avoid
another Y2K problem for the history of the universe.  (OK, I guess a
smiley was appropriate.)  But I'd rather cover more time and
sacrifice a bit of precision.  Say a coverage of 3,000 billion years
at 260 zeptosecond resolution.  :-)

The GNAT standard time of 1677 to about 2262 would lead to a massive
need to rewrite all of our code just as it was getting too complex
to deal with!   :-)

(GNAT standard taken from Keith Thompson's response.  Sorry, I
didn't look this up. zeptoseconds huh?  Hadn't heard about them! )

Robert Dewar wrote:

> In article <387246D7.8B1B2E8B@earthlink.net>,
>   Charles Hixson <charleshixsn@earthlink.net> wrote:
> > Robert Dewar wrote:
> >
> ...
>
> I am sort of guessing that a smiley is missing here, but if not,
> time is clearly a case where absolute error control and not
> relative error control is important, so the use of fixed point
> is far preferable.
>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Before you buy.