Proposal for 64 bit time. Just can't help but put in a little more .... A bit of speculative physics and religion here. To keep historians, geologists, cosmologists, theologians, ufologists and aliens happy, Perl needs neutral time base, which has the most far fetched possibility. Imagine a kid had swung the hair saloon door that oscillates till it comes to rest state, or steady state at whatever bias the spring of the door is. Let's say that whatever exists was/will be created in seven big bang-implosive oscillations. We're currently in the sixth bang and we'll achieve steady state which is the rest cycle on the seventh. Each oscillation lasts 40 billion years. Suppose, we're at the 12 billionth year of the 6th cycle. So roughly day zero = - (40x5 + 12) x10^9 * 365.24 * 24 * 3600 seconds from now. Which is 6.690028032 x 10^18. Since, 2^63 = 9.223372036854775808 x 10^18, an unsigned 64 bit int will really help take care of things until the sabbatical cycle. The speculated oscillatory life, in seconds, of the universe fits nicely into 64 bits, give or take 30% error margin. So can we have 64 bit time, please. [EMAIL PROTECTED] on 08/15/2000 12:48:00 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]@Internet cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]@Internet, [EMAIL PROTECTED]@Internet, [EMAIL PROTECTED]@Internet, [EMAIL PROTECTED]@Internet, [EMAIL PROTECTED]@Internet, [EMAIL PROTECTED]@Internet (bcc: Syloke Soong/Americas/NSC) Subject: Re: RFC 99 (v1) Maintain internal time in Modified Julian (notepoch) On Tue, Aug 15, 2000 at 09:25:34AM -0700, Larry Wall wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > : Yep. Or more generally "Standardize Perl on all platforms to one > : common time epoch" and reccommend the Unix epoch since it's so > : widespread. :-) > > Oh, gee, where's your sense of history? (As in creating our own. :-) > Maybe we should invent our own epoch, like the year 2000. Or use a > really standard one, like the year 0 AD (aka 1 BC). Well, if I had my history sense, I'd've recommended that we start our epoch at about 4.5 billion years ago to keep the geologists happy and if those cosmologists had their act together maybe I'd've recommended we start our epoch at about 15 billion years ago. ;-) > I have this horror that people will still be using 1970 as the epoch in > the year 31,536. You can almost count on it. But that won't be our fault as much as Unix's :-) -Scott -- Jonathan Scott Duff [EMAIL PROTECTED]
