- From: David Perrell <davidp@earthlink.net>
- Date: Sun, 24 Nov 1996 19:01:38 -0800
- To: "Benjamin Franz" <snowhare@netimages.com>
- Cc: "Style" <www-style@w3.org>, "HTML" <www-html@w3.org>
Benjamin Franz wrote: > You can both probably thank Microsoft for your problems. Apparently when > writing their C compiler, they committed a serious error that causes > *MANY* applications compiled with it to crash and burn for dates in the > second half of the next century. UNIX and DOS/Win C libraries use a datetime number based on seconds from 1 Jan 1970. On machines where this 'signed long' is a 32-bit value, the end of time arrives 19 Jan 2038. The Win32 runtime library has a date limit of 2099, corresponding to the opsys. Since most Win95 apps handle dates beyond the capabilities of the standard C routines, I'm inclined to believe the problem is in the code of the bad apps, not just the compiler. MS Office 97 apps support dates to 9999. Just think, if Win97 is equally capable no will need to upgrade for the next 8003 years! David Perrell
Received on Sunday, 24 November 1996 22:08:47 UTC