Subj : Re: Operating Systems
To   : tenser
From : Digital Man
Date : Fri Apr 12 2024 11:29:20

  Re: Re: Operating Systems
  By: tenser to claw on Sat Apr 13 2024 02:39 am

 > There's a lot of software out there, written 20 or 30 years
 > ago, that made a lot of assumptions about the state of the
 > world; there were a lot of programmers who thought to
 > themselves in 1991, "Gee, the year 2038 is a long time from
 > now..." and took shortcuts.

Speaking for myself at least, I started using time_t types for storing dates and times in C programs in 1988 and wasn't even aware that it would ever roll-over (go negative) at any point. I don't think I actually realized that most time_t's are signed (can go negative) and that for those systems (C libraries), dates before Jan-1-1970 are *suppoosed* to representable in that way (as negative valeus). [libraies that use unsigned time_t's cannot represent dates before Jan-1-1970] And I'm pretty sure it was 1992 when I did the math and realized that 2038 and 2106 are going to be problematic years for 32-bit time_t-based libraries/programs. It was certainly not discussed in the programming books or among C programmers of the era. We weren't taking shortcuts, we were just following the norms. Use of 64-bit integers for most things seemed excessive/wasteful and in many environments (e.g. 16-bit systems) not practical or even possible.
-- 
                                            digital man (rob)

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