Re: Issues with rand()

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Wednesday, December 29, 2010, Juhász Péter wrote:
> I've found it frustrating that there is
> no way within gnuplot to get the current time, one has to resort to an
> external application. There is already an extensive framework in place
> for formatting date&time strings, there is even a way to put the current
> time as a time stamp on the plot, but there is no way to get it as a
> variable (for example). There ought to be a time() function that returns
> the current gnuplot time (seconds since 2000), the existing formatting
> functions are adequate to transform that into any other format.

Sounds reasonable to me.  The only concern I see is the question of
whether it can be made totally portable, or whether it will need
documentation as being system-dependent.

As you noted before in a sample script, on unix-ish systems you can do 
  time = system("date +%s")
to get the number of seconds since the unix epoch.  Maybe it would be
sufficient to export a user variable containing the offset between
system time and internal time?
  internal_time = system("date +%s") - GPVAL_EPOCH
Nah. That would just confuse everyone.