While working over ctime, I came up with a couple of questions:

In asctime, shouldn't the year really be printed with %4d (or maybe %-4d) so that the returned string is guaranteed to have its advertised 26-character length? (I realize that the code is lifted directly from the X3J11 draft standard, and that %d will only get it wrong for dates in the middle ages that a 32-bit time_t can't begin to reach. On the other hand, asctime gets handed a broken-down tm struct, so early years are quite possible.)

Shouldn't the offtime() routine be declared static? It's not a publicized interface.

Steve Summit stevesu@copper.tek.com

Even %4d won't guarantee the advertised 26-character length if tm_year is big (or small) enough (for example, 10000); bogus tm_wday and tm_mon values can cause problems as well. You may want to send a note to an X3J11 committee member. offtime was declared static in the mod.sources posting unless STD_INSPIRED was defined. Its eventual fate lies more in the hands of standards committees and other folks wiser than yours truly at this point. --ado