I too have some sympathy with Paul Gilmartin's objectives, but a twos-complement representation of a hardware clock would be problematic in many ways.
Dates alone are of course unproblematic. A signed fullword Gregorian-Day value is usable to represent dates ±5.8 million years about the Gregorian calendar's epoch origin, midnight, Sunday, 0000 December 31; a signed doubleword one would take us back to the Big Bang. Moreover, dates are enough for most events that occurred before AD 1900. Apart from those of certain astronomical events--Eclipses are the obvious example--that can be calculated with great precision, the time-of-day of these events is not usually known with any precision. More on-topic is the fact that arithmetic with STCKE values is not difficult. There are indeed contexts in which it is trivial. Mathematicians who are interested in prime number sequences and densities have had multiple-precision binary arithmetic packages available to them since the days of the IBM 704. Or again, because I write a lot of AMODE(64) code, I have written a set of macros that do multiple-precision binary arithmetic using signed-fullword arithmetic set-symbol elements; and there is reason to believe that [too] many others have had to write such macros too. One comment on terminology is in order here too. In the light of the substance of Swift's 'modest proposal' Paul Gilmartin's 'immodest proposal' merits description as one. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA
