Re: Software Engineering News Brief

[eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)]

In article <3290e3b8.3406981@news.wam.umd.edu> rsrodger@wam.umd.edu (Robert Rodgers) writes:

  > I don't see why you wouldn't want to use, say, a 128bit dating system.
  > This would allow indexing the contents of the filesystem by date --
  > including the geological record, and all of human history.  For a huge
  > database system (say, of the sort that futurists like to talk about
  > for ~50 to ~100 years from now) this would be quite useful (especially
  > since timestamp on files has pretty much become useless).

    The problem is that there are incommensurate dating schemes.  I
may know that a particular event occured in the second year of Ramses
the Second's reign and at the same time be debating furiously which
century of the Hebrew calendar that date corresponds to.  If you need
a wide date range, you need more than one supported date format, and
(in Ada) a discriminant as part of each date.  Today is November 20,
1996 Gregorian, and November 7, 1996 Julian.  Live with it.


--

					Robert I. Eachus

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