Re: [PLUG] Party to celebrate 10^9 seconds of UNIX?

[Jeff Abrahamson <jeff@purple.com>]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2001 at 02:09:02PM -0400, A.N.Varady wrote:
> Hi, 
> 
> I checked the PLUG calendar and the list archives and I didn't see mention of
> any local commemoration for the upcoming 1 billion second milestone for UNIX.
> (UNIX keeps track of time as a number of seconds since midnight 1 January 1970
> and right now the number is at about 999015500 and rising). 
> 
> According to, "date -d '1970-01-01 1000000000 sec'", the milestone will be
> reached Sun Sep 9 02:46:40 EDT 2001. A quick search on the web showed that some
> other LUGs will be having a party that night so I was wondering if anyone in
> Philly was interested in a party as well.

This is also the source of the dreaded U1E9 bug: for the first time in
useful history, string and numeric comparisons of the date will
differ. In perl, for example, people are often careless about saying

    $date1 < $date2

vs

    $date1 lt $date2

(The first is numeric, the second string.) They yield the same results
from the early 70's until about two weeks from now. Then you find that

    999999999 < 1000000000

but

    999999999 lt 1000000000

is false.

Why did people do it? It's clear when we're talking about numbers, but
writing perl programs you sometimes get so in the habit of comparing
strings you make a mistake. Usually you'd catch it, but this was
harmless. But that was then.

-- 
 Jeff

 Jeff Abrahamson  <http://www.purple.com/jeff/>



______________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group       -      http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements-http://lists.phillylinux.org/mail/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  -  http://lists.phillylinux.org/mail/listinfo/plug