Re: 30-year time offset reading nonuniform matrix %s input

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

On Wednesday, April 03, 2013 02:12:55 pm Juhász Péter wrote:
> On Wed, 2013-04-03 at 12:36 -0700, Ethan Merritt wrote:

> > 
> > Does anyone know why, way back in the mists of time, gnuplot decided to 
> > define its own epoch boundary as 1-jan-2000 rather than use the conventional
> > unix epoch boundary 1-jan-1970? 
> >   
> > Did it have something to do with fitting an integer number of seconds 
> > in a 32-bit, or even 16-bit, integer? 
> > 
> > How many things would break if we did away with this 30 year disagreement?
> > 
> > 	Ethan
> > 
> > 
> 
> Currently this disagreement manifests itself even in the user interface:
> the meaning of "%s" is different, depending on whether it was used as an
> input or output spec.
> 
> Doing away with it might break a few scripts that depend on the epoch
> being 2000.0, but on the plus side it would make everything clearer and
> more consistent - both the internal implementation and the user
> documentation, not to mention that it would also be consistent with the
> rest of the (Unix) world.
> 
> I might add that 4.6.0 would have been a good place to make this change.
>
> Peter

Ah, but the major version change 4->5 would be an even better time.
I will add it to my "Things to break in 5.0" list [*].

My current thinking is that a 4.7 snapshot could be put out as a 
release candidate for 5.0 late this year.

	Ethan

[*] "break" in this case means "make no guarantee of backward compatibility"

-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center,  K-428 Health Sciences Bldg
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742