On 11 Oct 1998 01:32:39 -0000, D. J. Bernstein <djb@cr.yp.to> wrote:
This example certainly doesn't convince me that mktime()'s handling of invalid dates is a bad thing.
True, the examples we have been dealing with have not been crossing the line that mktime() has trouble with. Those mainly occur when one has to deal with a discontinuity, such as imposed by a Summer Time crossing. But I'm prepared to drop the idea, because of the point that Joe Celko raised: there is *no* well-accepted standard in the "real world" on how to deal with this. Each application will have to implement its own rules. I still wish there were some good way to provide applications with the knowledge of the calendar which the time portion of the C library has, so that we didn't have to have each application writer make their own idiosyncratic mistakes in this realm, but I cannot think of how to do this in a resonable manner. --Ken Pizzini