Re: RFC 99 (v1) Maintain internal time in Modified Julian (not epoch)

[Jonathan Scott Duff]

On Mon, Aug 14, 2000 at 08:40:32PM -0700, Nathan Wiger wrote:
> No, but currently Perl IS forcing Windows, Mac, and BeOS users to
> understand what the UNIX epoch is. 

So you're proposing that rather than give one platform (unix) an
advantage, we force all platforms to use some other completely
arbitrary date/time format?

> There's some other advantages to MJD beyond system-independence. Namely,
> it allows easy date arithmetic, meaning complex objects are not required
> to modify dates even down to the nanosecond level.

Sorry, but date arithmetic is easy now:

        $then = time();
        # time passes
        $now = time();
        $difference = $now - $then;     # How long was that?

And as to modifying dates "down to the nanosecond", you're proposing
that these MJD dates be floating point numbers.  Why not ust make
time() return a float and *bam* you've got <1 second precision as far
as your floats or doubles can carry you.

> But make the core language easily accessible to everyone.

Funny, that's the exact argument I would use *against* mjdate().
        
-Scott
-- 
Jonathan Scott Duff
[EMAIL PROTECTED]