gnuplot-info

[Gnuplot-info] an open complaint about the 2000 epoch

[aaron b. <bri...@gm...>]

gentlemen:

making gnuplot's epoch start in 2000 instead of 1970 may have seemed
clever, but for me this was an epic mistake. it's just too confusing.
juggling incompatible indices of my many timepoints, i reliably get
"no data within fixed range" and the year 2040 in my output. gnuplot
is obliged to support the UNIX epoch for reading in data (set timefmt
'%s'), but then it requires contortions to define ranges and tics;
just arithmetic, i realize, but let me be the first to say that i
still find this excruciating. how many man-hours have been wasted
working around this completely artificial problem?

gnuplot should at least provide an option to conform to the standard
used by other UNIX systems, a 1970 epoch.

best regards,
aaron brick.


--   aaron brick
--   aa...@li...

Re: [Gnuplot-info] an open complaint about the 2000 epoch

[Thomas S. <t.s...@fz...>]

gnuplot is written for a variety of operating systems and platforms.
each family of operating systems has its own 'beginning of time', see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoch_(reference_date)#Computing

in view of the then coming year 2000 gnuplot programmers chose not
to rely on time routines of the various operating systems, but to write
own routines.


aaron brick-3 wrote:
> 
> gentlemen:
> 
> making gnuplot's epoch start in 2000 instead of 1970 may have seemed
> clever, but for me this was an epic mistake. it's just too confusing.
> juggling incompatible indices of my many timepoints, i reliably get
> "no data within fixed range" and the year 2040 in my output. gnuplot
> is obliged to support the UNIX epoch for reading in data (set timefmt
> '%s'), but then it requires contortions to define ranges and tics;
> just arithmetic, i realize, but let me be the first to say that i
> still find this excruciating. how many man-hours have been wasted
> working around this completely artificial problem?
> 
> gnuplot should at least provide an option to conform to the standard
> used by other UNIX systems, a 1970 epoch.
> 
> best regards,
> aaron brick.
> 
> 
> --   aaron brick
> --   aa...@li...
> 
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