While the list has been discussing time and timezones in context of the IEEE P1003 standards committee, people have lost sight of X3J11 which is much more important and further along towards casting into concrete. (Dramatic effect) As we now talk, the concrete has been laid and is hardening. (End drama). People should get out their X3J11 Draft Proposed American Standard for Information Systems -- Programming Language C (Dated October 1, 1986). This standard is ALREADY entering the balloting process. Please turn to page 151 and following: Section 4.12 -- Date and Time. The standard ALREADY covers clock_t, time_t, struct tm (without new strings or fields!!), clock(), time(), difftime(), mktime(), asctime(), ctime(), gmtime(), localtime(), strftime(). Thus the current discussions on the whole time subject are rapidly becomming academic as the ANSI C is already spoken and the C standard is currently in the comment phase -- send a comment and proposed change of ruling. The next phase is balloting and trial use. People will be relieved in that, except for the casting (sic) into concrete of struct tm, much is left unsaid, especially things like timezones; except to say if timezone is unknown or unsupported return (int)-1 in the approporiate place, and for gmtime return NULL if the offset is unknown. Also checkout the semantics of mktime!! -- =Dennis L. Mumaugh Lisle, IL ...!{ihnp4,cbosgd,lll-crg}!cuuxb!dlm