Ian, You just scared me. It is 2019 which has four digits. In less than 8,000 years we will need to take the fifth to make numbers from 10,000 to 10,999. 90,000 years later we will need a sixth digit and so on.
Do you know how many potential Y2K-like anomalies we may have between now and year 292,277,026,596 when it may all be over? Will people evert learn and just set aside lots of room that dates can grow into or allow varying lengths? Makes me wonder though why anyone in the distant future would want numbers that long to represent that date. I suspect that long before then, some surviving members of whatever the human race becomes will do a reset to a new calendar such as the date the first settlers arrived in the Gamma Quadrant. So whatever unit they store time in, though, may still need a way to reach back to historic times just as we do by talking about what may have happened in 2000 B.C. -----Original Message----- From: Python-list <python-list-bounces+avigross=verizon....@python.org> On Behalf Of Ian Kelly Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2019 2:14 PM To: Python <python-list@python.org> Subject: Re: Pythonic Y2K On Wed, Jan 16, 2019 at 9:57 PM Avi Gross <avigr...@verizon.net> wrote: > > The forthcoming UNIX 2038 problem will, paradoxically happen on > January 19. I wonder what they will do long before then. Will they just add a byte or four or 256 and then make a date measurable in picoseconds? Or will they start using a number format that can easily deal with 1 Million B.C. and 5 Billion A.D. just in case we escape earth before it co-locates with the expanding sun. The obvious solution is to stop using 32-bit Unix timestamps and start using 64-bit Unix timestamps. This change has already been made in some OSes, and the problem will not repeat until the year 292,277,026,596, by which time it is highly unlikely that either Unix timestamps or humankind itself will still exist. Even if they will, that moment in time is so far out from the present that I can't really be bothered by the possibility. We have 19 years to take care of the problem before it happens. Hopefully this time around we won't be trying to fix it right up until the last minute. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
