On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Peter J. Acklam wrote: > Nit-picking perhaps, but I think the language in the docs needs to > some rewording. There is too much confusion about what the epoch > is. Common practice says the epoch is _point_in_time_. Keeping > that in mind, the following makes little sense > > $epoch_time = $dt->epoch; # may return undef for non-epoch times > > What is a "non-epoch time"? And why "may" it return undef? Will > it or will it not return undef? I'd say something like "returns > undef if output overflows". > > * day_of_year, doy > Returns the day of the year. Analogous to the yday attribute of > gmtime (or localtime) except that it works outside of the epoch. > > What is a time "outside of the epoch"? The epoch is not a time > span. And this > > Using epochs is not recommended, since they have such a limited > range, at least on 32-bit machines. > > "Using epochs"? I'd say "Representing time as seconds since the > epoch is not recommended ..." > > Any opinions?
I've changed some of the wording to try to make it clearer that what I'm recommending against is using your system's representation of seconds since the epoch. -dave /*======================= House Absolute Consulting www.houseabsolute.com =======================*/
