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

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

On Friday, April 05, 2013 08:46:42 am Dave Denholm wrote:
> 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

Thank you for insight into the history.
I'll go ahead and change it in CVS for the development version, 
with comments attached in the relevant places.  
Reversion, if necessary, would be trivial.

We know this fixes several problems, including the one that kicked
off the current thread of discussion.  The only down side I know of
is that the javascript scripts used for mousing svg and HTML5 plots
must now match the version of gnuplot used to generate the plot.
This was probably true already for other reasons, but now a mismatch
would be evident when tracking time coordinates as well.


	Ethan


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