On Dec 27, 2012, at 8:52 PM, John E. Malmberg <malmb...@encompasserve.org>
wrote:
> On 12/24/2012 4:19 PM, Thomas Pfau wrote:
>> I wrote a time module that interfaces to the VMS time system services -
>> $BINTIM, $ASCTIM, $GETTIM, and $NUMTIM. I also had a replacement routines
>> for $ASCTIM, $BINTIM and $GETTIM that could be used on non-VMS platforms.
>>
>> Currently it accepts and returns VMS time buffers as 8 byte strings but I
>> was thinking of allowing numeric values to be passed if perl was built with
>> 64 bit integer support. I could detect the input format by using
>> SvIOK/SvPOK. The problem I have is determining how the user wants the
>> information returned.
>
> Can you use wantarray?
>
>> Current interface ($now and $bin are 8 byte strings containing the time):
>> $now = gettim();
>> $bin = bintim('01-jan-2010 12:00:00.00');
>> $asc = asctim($bin);
>> ($year, $month, $day, $hr, $mn, $sc, $cc) = numtim($bin);
>>
>> I'm thinking of using an optional additional argument on gettim and bintim
>> that would be written with the 8 byte string and have the routines return
>> the time as an integer if perl is built with 64 bit integers. I could try
>> to interface to the bigint module and return a bigint value if 64 bit
>> integers aren't available.
>
>> Would anyone find this useful? Any comments on the interface?
It looks like a good translation into Perl of the native time routines.
>
> It might be useful. As I posted earlier, I am looking at what it would take
> to implement a perl script that could be run detached to keep a VMS directory
> synchronized with Dropbox.
>
> While I have not yet started my investigation, I suspect that I will need to
> convert time stamps from the DropBox server to that of the VMS server. These
> time stamps might be in Windows format or Linux format, so I would need a way
> to convert and compare the timestamps, hopefully with the least loss of
> precision.
A very long time ago Dan Sugalski posted an example of converting VMS quadword
dates into Unix seconds since the epoch:
<http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/vmsperl/1998-11/msg00063.html>
That gives you the seconds in a a double, which is good enough up until the
year 3000 or so.
________________________________________
Craig A. Berry
mailto:craigbe...@mac.com
"... getting out of a sonnet is much more
difficult than getting in."
Brad Leithauser
