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

[Dave D. <drd...@gm...>]

Ethan Merritt <merritt@u.washington.edu> writes:

>
> I'd still like to know what the origianl rationale was for 
> choosing 2000 rather than 1970.  I know plenty of problems that
> this choice caused, but what problems did it solve?
> Are they still relevant?
>

Sorry, I think it was probably me.  I didn't use unix back then,
so 2000 seemed as arbitrary as 1970.

Originally it wasn't intended that it be visible to the user anyway,
but it was discovered later that you could use numbers rather than strings
in things like setting ranges for time data.

I think I also had in mind that, because time was stored a real number,
it wasn't good to carry a large offset around since that limited the
resolution available for small numbers. But I think that's probably not
relevant in practise.

Dave D