Hi Arjen, We had this discussion when I first implemented the date / time functions. It is a trade off between using the widely available system routines (with their limitations) and supporting our own set of date / time formatting routines with an associated large overhead on the developers. Of course in the long term 64-bit will solve many of the problems.
In the intermediate term there are often solutions. If you are plotting over many years and just formatting the year, then you may well not need to use the date / time formatting at all. If you are working over a shorter range of dates / times and don't need the year, then it doesn't actually matter what year you choose. Example 29 illustrates this. (Just be careful about leap years). Also, you can always format the year as a two digit year (%y, %g), and so the exact century doesn't matter. The only easyish way around this I could think of which still retained second accurancy would be to allow you to specify the epoch (i.e. the date / time which corresponds to t = 0). We'd still need our own implementation of strftime to actually use this though. Andrew On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 08:55:30AM +0100, Arjen Markus wrote: > Hello, > > can anyone comment on the available range for the date/time axes? > I ask because of the wish to plot dates before 1970, the typical > epoch year, as expressed in > https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1743004&group_id=2915&atid=352915. > > I checked the definition of time_t on my Linux system: it is a > four-bytes integer, so the > range is roughly from 1904-2036. > > How can we go beyond this range? Do we have to use a 64-bits machine? > > Regards, > > Arjen > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft > Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. > http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ > _______________________________________________ > Plplot-devel mailing list > Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
