On Wed, 5 Jan 2000, David Schwartz wrote:
> Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 13:40:08 -0800
> From: David Schwartz <davids@webmaster.com>
> To: Dominik Kubla <dominik.kubla@uni-mainz.de>,
> Richard B. Johnson <root@chaos.analogic.com>
> Cc: doug@springer.net, linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu
> Subject: RE: time_t size: The year 2038 bug?
>
> > On Wed, Jan 05, 2000 at 03:32:53PM -0500, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> > ...
> > > I think that before 38 years is up, none of us will be using 32-bit
> > > machines so, even if I was 10 years old, I wouldn't bother 'fixing'
> > > 32-bit machines. Even Intel's new stuff is 64 bits.
> >
> > Incidentally this is the exact argument that reportedly was used against
> > those who warned about the Y2K problen in late seventies/early eighties!
>
> No it is not. The argument used in the late seventies / early eighties was
> that nobody would be using the same application code. Most of us are writing
> application code now that makes no such date-related assumptions. A
> recompile will fix them.
>
are you really sure that application programmers allocate space for dates
based on sizeof(date var) and do not assume that that is 32 bits?
this is like the statement that was made last year on a firewall list that
anyone who remembered the leap year calculation was something other then
y/4 would remember the entire formula, this was discredited in the very
next post by someone who agreed that the formula was y/4 unless y/100
(forgetting except y/400)
I would lay serious money down that a lot of stuff that stores dates in
binary files only allocate 4 bytes for it without checking it's size.
(and yes I realize that this bet cannot really be settled until the 2038
"crisis" hits)
David Lang
> We aren't saying that our code will not be in use after 2038. It may well
> be. But it will work by then.
>
> DS
>
>
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