Re: [MacPerl] Y2K complience

["David T. McWherter" <dtm@waterw.com>]

> Also I find it hard to believe that the epoch on a Mac is January 1,
> 1904.  I am not a mac expert (I work mainly on unix boxes) but I find it

It's true.

> hard to believe that _all_ macs can store a number that large!  Just to

The Macintosh - the ORIGINAL Macintosh, introduced in 1984, had
a 32-bit 68000 processor.  All 68000 processors were 32-bit
capable.  Regardless, it is quite possible to manipulate quantities
bigger than the word size of the machine you're working on - it 
just requires more instructions.  For instance, there are a lot
of Quicktime structures that represent 64-bit quantities, despite
the fact that no Mac has a 64-bit data integer word...

> get to the year 2000 we would be talking about 96 years (that is
> 2,936,217,600 seconds).  That would fit into a 32 bit binary number with
> about 43 years to spare.  But I do not believe that the 68k macs are 32
> bit machines.  Maybe the epoch is Jan 1, 1904 on PowerPC's but not on
> 68k mac's but I very much doubt it.  That would make for very very
> unportable code!!!!
>
> Maybe there is someone out there that can clarify this!!!!!

Hope that helped...And to confuse the issue even more, I believe
that times are all handled in 64-bit quantities now by the MacOS,
but I'm not 100% sure on that...

-David McWherter
dtm@waterw.com
 
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