On Fri, 24 May 2002 06:10:39 PDT, the world broke into rejoicing as Thomas Lockhart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > ... > > But anybody using Unix dates as "general dates" has leaped into exactly the > > same sort of trap that caused people to get so paranoid about Y2K.
> Certainly true. We don't use Unix dates as "general dates", we use the > Unix time zone database and API for dates and times within the year > range of 1903 to 2038. Well, up until now anyway... I don't think going past 1970 is particularly safe; it certainly doesn't seem to fit with ANSI... By the way, the seemingly relevant link to look at for TZ info is http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm, linking to the data used by various Unix implementations. > Prior to the 1900s, the concept of time zones was more localized and > not universally adopted. In the US, a first round of time zone > standardization came with the transcontinental railroads in the 1860s. > After 2038, it is a good bet that time zones will resemble those in > use today, but they are as much a political construct as a physical > one so the details are subject to change. Some of the zones are quite peculiar if you head to Africa and Asia; there are some sitting on 15 minute intervales, rather than the usual 1h intervals. (The classic Canadian timezone joke is "World ends at 9:00; 9:30 in Newfoundland". For more information, see TZ='America/St_Johns') -- (concatenate 'string "chris" "@cbbrowne.com") http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/spreadsheets.html "Heuristics (from the French heure, "hour") limit the amount of time spent executing something. [When using heuristics] it shouldn't take longer than an hour to do something." ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly
