public newer than the signature

[Mark H. Wood]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 06:43:49PM -0500, Andrew Berg wrote:
> Time for computers is generally just the number of seconds since January 1, 
> 1970 at 12:00:00 UTC if I'm not mistaken. Date formats are derived from that 
> and displayed according to the user's preference.

Would that it were that simple.  The epoch (time 0) means different
times in different OSes.  Unix uses the above, Microsoft products use
another, VMS system time is the quadword number of nanoseconds since
some time on some date in (IIRC) November, 1858 (associated with some
astronomical catalog), etc.  SQL has its own ideas about how to
measure time regardless what your OS believes.  Even on the same OS
you may find different sets of functions that work with different
representations and may even use different epochs.

It's a valid point that how the machine counts time and how various
programs represent time as text are two different matters, and that
typically the OS presents time in a form that makes arithmetic easy
and the userspace program is responsible for making it comprehensible
to humans.

Time is a mess, dates doubly so.  That's why I usually write something
like either 13-Aug-2008 or 20080813T093730 even if it does make people
stop and think.

-- 
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   mwood at IUPUI.Edu
Typically when a software vendor says that a product is "intuitive" he
means the exact opposite.

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