Re: UNIX/POSIX Time

[mgk25@cl.cam.ac.uk (Markus Kuhn)]

dale@cs.rmit.edu.au (Dale Stanbrough) writes:
|> My guess? It will be too costly to replace 32 bit time_t, so a 64 bit
|> time_t (time_t_64?) will be introduced along side it, and lots of code
|> will continue to use time_t (32).

C's time.h is broken in a great number of ways (there have already been
many complaints about this during the ISO C89 standardization process), and
there are currently several proposals around to replace it completely in
ISO C 9X. Mine is on

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/c-time/

including references to other proposals.

Have a look at it (especially the rationale) if you are interested in
problems there are and how they could be fixed nicely. I think my proposal
contains numerous ideas that should also be of interest for the time API
designers of other languages. Ada.Calendar is certainly better than time.h,
but far from perfect and lacks for instance support for UTC leap seconds
and local time zones.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>