use-revolution digest, Vol 1 #332 - 13 msgs

[David Vaughan]

On Thursday, April 11, 2002, at 06:41 , nedlud at postoffice.pacbell.net 
wrote:

> January 22, 1998
> From: Jonathan <nedlud at pacbell.net>
> To: <use-revolution at lists.runrev.com>
> Mime-Version: 1.0
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
>
> Rob,
>
> I'm afraid you are mistaken. Seconds are extremely limited. Their limits
> are directly related to the limits of the computer. At the moment this
> means that time starts in the 1970's. So, for example, if you want to do
> common calculations such as generating the age of a person from their
> birthday you are screwed. The same is true for any calculation outside 
> of
> the operating systems time window.

Jonathan

Untrue. Try it.
I am older than 32 years so the calculation simply involves my birthday, 
pre-1970, being in negative time, which seems perfectlly reasonable to 
some :-).

> Furthermore, I suspect that this is
> different on different platforms,
yes. OS X has the UNIX base of 1970 where OS 9 has the Mac base of 1904, 
for example, but this does not mean...
> so the problem will not be consistent.
...because the inconsistency is completely immaterial to the arithmetic 
on any given platform.
>
snip
> Also, I believe that Richard Gaskin posted a set of julian functions to
> the metacard list 3 or 4 months ago.
Can we find them readily, or could someone post them here?

regards
David
>
> J/
>
>
>
> Rob Cozens <rcozens at pon.net> wrote on 4/10/2002 11:49 AM
>
>> The real bottom line is there are internal date representations (eg:
>> seconds; the long date) that naturally sort in chronological order,
>> and using seconds one can add/subtract days (1 day = 86400 seconds);
>> so there is little practical need for Julian date representation.
>> --
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