Re: Noooooo... (localtime in Unix98)

[Bennett Todd <bet@rahul.net>]

As Dominic said, the Unix98 stuff doesn't bite like the original
poster hinted it might. They left tm_year alone:-).

But someone on another list sent me some refs for this, which I
include here:

<URL:http://www.UNIX-systems.org/version2/whatsnew/year2000.html>
<URL:http://www.sun.com/y2000/devguide.html>
<URL:http://www.unix.digital.com/unix/year2000/whitepaper.html#time-handling>
<URL:http://www.hp.com/year2000/pdf/whitepap.pdf>

And in case anyone is interested, I'd sum up these refs as asserting
that when writing a parser that has to assume a correct century
for a 2-digit year, you should normally assume a window such that
years 69-99 are 19xx and 00-68 are 20xx. Obviously, this can't be
universal; the final decision needs to depend on the application.
E.g. that would probably be a poor choice of window for processing
birthdates today. But as a default, particularly when the dates are
for things like files or email messages or other computer data, and
not external things like people, it seems pretty reasonable.

-Bennett

PGP signature

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Follow-Ups from:

François Désarménien <desar@club-internet.fr>

References to:

Bart Schuller <schuller@lunatech.com>
Dominic Dunlop <domo@computer.org>

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