Re: Fwd: Re: unix epoch data wrapping

[sfeam (E. Merritt) <eam...@gm...>]

On Sunday 28 March 2010, pl...@pi... wrote:


>what I asked for was for the software to behave as indicated in the
>doc : help for timefmt %y.
>There is no mention of this idiocy in help timefmt.
>
>That is a gnuplot shortcoming that has just been rectified thanks to my
>pointing it out and someone else providing a patch.
>
>"Thanks ?". Don't mention it , just carry on with the rant and insults.
>It's what you do so well.
>
> Software should not expect humans to know the subtle , unstable
> meanderings of an underlying library's internals and adapt their
> behaviour to the illogical software.

Please, both of you, let's keep the discussion civil.
Sniping at each other will not help, although bemoaning the sorry
state of software design in general is a time-honored tradition.

To the extent that there is any standard, the code follows it.
As is often the case, we may argue that the standard is crazy, but
where is there a better option? 

It's 50 years too late to avoid the original mistake of encoding dates
electronically as 2-digit characters.  And it's probably 50 years too 
early to expect software to be intelligent enough to figure out on its
own that a particular data file refers specifically to dates in the
20th century as opposed to the current or some other century.

On the bright side, gnuplot's string handling should now be good 
enough to work around the problem once you are aware that your particular
data files will trigger it.  If that isn't the case, then a bug report
with an example of the difficulty would be appreciated.