Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!hobbes.physics.uiowa.edu!news.iastate.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!uxa.cso.uiuc.edu!msp33327
From: msp33327@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Michael S. Pereckas)
Subject: Re: What time is it? [Was: Data compression standard]
Message-ID: <1991Jun24.231644.2020@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Sender: usenet@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News)
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
References: <859@spam.ua.oz> <3761@sirius.ucs.adelaide.edu.au> <shores.677707660@fergvax>
Date: Mon, 24 Jun 1991 23:16:44 GMT
Lines: 20

In <shores.677707660@fergvax> shores@fergvax.unl.edu (Shores) writes:

>I have a better idea.  Instead of storing a date STRING, why not just
>store a number?  The Macintosh stores dates as a 4 byte number,
>representing the seconds elapsed since Jan 1, 1904.  Unix has a similar
>convention, only from 1972 (better, IMHO).  Then it should be up to the
>user program to represent the date.   The Mac has IUDateString, unix and
>others have ctime(), etc.

That is totally non-human-readable, however.  That may not matter for
the application that started this thread, whatever that was, but it
can be useful.  Further, everyone will probably use a different
scheme, and one 32 bit number looks the same as the next.  Also, if
you decide that you need tenth-second accuracy, the string can be
extended without breaking the logic of the scheme, even if it does
--

< Michael Pereckas  <>  m-pereckas@uiuc.edu  <>  Just another student... >
   "This desoldering braid doesn't work.  What's this cheap stuff made
    of, anyway?"  "I don't know, looks like solder to me."
