January 22, 1998 From: Jonathan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Rob, I'm afraid you are mistaken. Seconds are extremely limited. Their limits are directly related to the limits of the computer. At the moment this means that time starts in the 1970's. So, for example, if you want to do common calculations such as generating the age of a person from their birthday you are screwed. The same is true for any calculation outside of the operating systems time window. Furthermore, I suspect that this is different on different platforms, so the problem will not be consistent. Julian dates are the standard for long time periods. Furthermore, Julian arithmetic is far simpler than the calculations required for seconds (no multiplication needed in most cases). And there are convenient methods for determining the day of the week -- something that is useful for calendars. Julian system is also a more compact representation -- seconds will eventually overflow when dealing with large time differentials. The closest functionality would be the date items function, but that is also tied to the computer clock and is therefore similarly limited. Frankly, I strongly believe that Julian dates should be the internal format since that would provide us with a standard time measure that is truly standard across all systems. Also, I believe that Richard Gaskin posted a set of julian functions to the metacard list 3 or 4 months ago. J/ Rob Cozens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 4/10/2002 11:49 AM >The real bottom line is there are internal date representations (eg: >seconds; the long date) that naturally sort in chronological order, >and using seconds one can add/subtract days (1 day = 86400 seconds); >so there is little practical need for Julian date representation. >-- _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
