Someone wrote:
Yes, but nothing in a UNIX system happened in the 19th century. Non-UNIX systems lacking "time_t" have done quite well dealing with times; I don't see any need to use "time_t" for every kind of timestamp any application could possibly want.
Mark replied: ! Sorry, but I disagree. UNIX provides some very nice date/time ! manipulation routines, [...]. I had to reinvent this wheel, and ! I swiped code from ctime like crazy. I wound up choosing ISO time ! (char string) as my standard format. While Unix does not need dates before 1970, I agree it should be more flexible. In order to provide a consistent time format for a network of heterogeneous machines that had time epochs != 1/1/70, I too used the ISO format for dates and times. I didn't have to go as far as Mark did because only network programs (that cared) used the new date/time format; existing programs used OS-dependent calls. Pre-epoch dates were a pain... Bob Devine