In message <199604040924.SAA11067@jms.jeton.or.jp> Dan Kogai writes: >At 01:18 96.04.04, Matthias Ulrich Neeracher wrote: >>>[...]. Mac's time(), on the other hand, returns seconds since 1904/01/01 >>>just like that of toolbox and HyperTalk's "the seconds". as a result >>>timegm() of my newtimelocal.pl was off 2082877200 seconds, or whatever >>>&timegm(0,0,0,1,0,70) of original timelocal.pl returns. > > Sorry. You are right and so is Mac's time(). It is just a matter of Epoc >h and ANY Epoch is bound to be relative unless we set the Epoch to the very >moment of Big Bang. (I wonder how large the int must be to implement such s >cale of time. Even quadword looks not big enough). Hmm, I thought the age of the universe was commonly considered to be around 10E10 years, give or take one order of magnitude. Since a year has about Pi*10E7 seconds, 10E18 seconds should be enough, and a quadword easily holds 10E19 seconds. > Your view, IMHO, is quite reasonabile and for the time being, I'll rewrit >e newtimelocal.pl and other releated time-releated libraries of mine to be M >acPerl compatible. Now the question is, what is the best way to find whethe >r the code is running on MacPerl or not. In the previous mail I said I can >do so by checking the value of $[, but this can be easily tricked by renamin >g the application. Another way to go is the check the value of $ENV{'MACPER >L'}; if empty it's not MacPerl. But is this a guaranteed way? The current answer to this is $MacPerl::Version, which contains a meaningful value under all versions of MacPerl. Recently, it was decided to introduce in all Perl5 ports an $^O built-in, which returns the OS. i haven't decided on the exact value yet, but "MacOS" is the most likely candidate. Another question is whether you *have* to special case for MacPerl at all. Would it maybe be possible to make your library auto-calibrating by calling something like gmtime(0) at the beginning? Matthias ----- Matthias Neeracher <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch> http://err.ethz.ch/members/neeri.html "One fine day in my odd past..." -- Pixies, _Planet of Sound_