Re: Back-of-the-envelope cost of extra data :-)

Arthur David Olson <olsona@lecserver.nci.nih.gov> writes:

One way to reduce data file growth is to store just 5 bytes of time_t values rather than 8.

That sounds like progress, but can't the number of bytes for time_t (4 through 8) be in the header? That way, we won't have a Y20K problem. Another possibility is to use a varying-width representation, I suppose. This can be combined with the idea of using delta-T rather than T, to yield fairly compact external representation. Here's another idea: stick to the current representation unless the input mentions time stamps past 2038. That way, "zic" won't generate new-format outputs for old-format inputs.