2) Provide a general-purpose time value manipulation package for the benefit of applications that have to deal with arbitrary dates and times.

In fact, you may even be able to write the latter package in some language available on lots of machines (C, Fortran, whatever), and decouple it from the system entirely.

Unfortunately, such a library has to know all the time zone rules, which means it has to redo all the stuff ctime does. It also has to know the local conventions for figuring out what time zone you're in, which means it won't be portable. The bulk of this package would be very similar to ctime.c or ADO's package. I would prefer to see either an upward compatible extension or else a dual interface to the same code. Mark