> When %s was added to strftime() it was done by simply calling > mktime(). I don't know who originally did that, but that's what > happened, and after that the interface was simply copied. [...]
> [...redesign...] > But doing that in a way that's agreeable to everyone, and then > getting it actually used by applications, is a huge job. It will > take years (writing the struct definition, probably just days, or > weeks for agreement, writing (or modifying) all the library code > certainly weeks, probably longer to get better interfaces than we now > have, updating all the applications years, or even decades. Decades to get it in use, certainly. But I see no need to bother with agreement. Whoever added %s didn't canvas the community and get agreement; they just added the code. Whoever added long long to C didn't plan (as far as I can tell); they just added it, it got popular and became an ascended glitch. I suspect that's what will happen here. If - when, I hope! - we get a better interface, I suspect it will not be a result of a bunch of planning and coordination; it will be someone getting fed up and implementing _something_, and it's "good enough" so it gets popular and becomes a de-facto standard, eventually becoming a de-jure standard. I just hope whichever one ends up getting popular turns out to have been done by someone relatively sane. On other fragments of this mail, > The standard is going to (as it should) say what works now, I'm not sure I agree that it should. Sometimes "what works now" is broken enough, or inconsistent enough, that standards do invent new things. Occasionally, even, we get good standards that way. > [...redesign...]. Aside from anything else tm_year being an int is > just too small, [...] ...?? You're concerned about the interface design lasting past Gregorian 34737 (or 2147485617, if you abandon <32-bit ints)? /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
