On Thu, 20 Jul 2017 16:58:11 -0700, Charles Mills wrote: >Far be it from me to try to interpret the POSIX standards. It's definitely >signed on z/OS. > >typedef long time_t; > >Why waste a bit if you are not going to support negative? Making it unsigned >would have put off the Year 2038 problem an additional 68+ years. > I had a similar feeling about STCKE. If the 128-bit value returned by STCKE is treated as unsigned, it spans 1900 CE to about 38434 CE. If it were to be treated as signed it would be about 16367 BCE to 20167 CE. In this list, I argued for the signed representation, feeling that representing dates in the 19th century CE has more practical use than representing dates in the 202nd century CE. IBM employees said it's too late to make that choice -- code already extant relies on STCKE's returning a value to be treated as unsigned.
(Computations approximate -- not to be used in life-and-death situations.) -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
