Re: [MacPerl] "Epoch-making difference"--time()

[dankogai@jms.jeton.or.jp (Dan Kogai)]

At 11:11 96.04.03, Bill Crosbie wrote:
> I might be wrong here... but I believe that this very difference is
> mentioned in the read-me.

  I'd have found out if so;  I am a lazy guy (which makes a good programmer
accourding to larry wall :), lazy enough to read the documentation so that I
don't have to reinvent a wheel.  I even searched search engine of this maili
ng list seach engine concerning this subject (http://www.its.unimelb.edu.au:
801/hma/pub/macperl/).
  Since I am more careless than easy, I made sure again by searching any occ
urance of "time(" using BBEdit (beats hell out of emacs!) and found 105 occu
rance but they are all parts of codes.  FIY files with hits are;

        who
        Benchmark.pm
        chat2.inter
        chat2.pl
        ctime.pl
        macchat.pl
        POSIX.pm
        Local.pm
        timelocal.pl
        perlapi.html
        perlfunc.html
        time.t

(This very output was done via MacPerl with original search result by BBEdit
.  the greatest thing about MacPerl is that running the whole script is as h
andy as one-liners!  You just open an untitiled perl script and command-shif
t-r!).


> It sounds like you did an incredible amount of
> work with this, and that you really know your stuff.

Thank you for your compliment.  But I spent only a couple of hours in total
(not even a week has passed since I started with newtimelocal) on this.  And
this is still my 1st day with MacPerl--I may be an experienced (not necessar
ily good) perl prgrammer but I am a MacPerl newbie!).  All I did was write a
quick and dirty one-liners for testing (most of which not even saved; I just
typed and command-shift-r).   newtimelocal.pl was originally written on MacT
en then tested on Sparc 20 but without MacPerl's great interface, this "Epoc
h making" discovery wouldn't have beeen this easy!

> Clearly much better
> than I curretnly know perl.  I bow before the clearly superior coder.   :)

Well, newtimelocal.pl was the last thing I want to do.  I am too lazy to do
this kind of super-basic, low-level stuff (don't be confused with low-level.
 Lower the level of programming the more difficult it gets;  think about wri
ting a kernel out of assembler).  I'd just use the original timelocal.pl if
it did what I wanted.  Anything related to date and time is a tough stuff (I
should have thank Pope Gregory, though.  It would've been a nightmare if our
calender is Jewish or any calender with "leap month"!) and I'd stay away fro
m it as distant as possible.  But darn, time & date is something you can't n
ever get away for accounting....

Dan the Man Lost in Time