I want to amend this posting of mine; they were only notes.
First of all, David Hall had additions to my notes, were they
posted here CK? I don't see them. Those are good; second,
the actual programming language library call does not work
as the above format indicates. However, if the programmer
stored past values in the above format, then problems could
arise. C is one of the embedded systems languages, and I've
done C on Unix boxes, but on Unix, the two digit year is the
number of years since 1900, so in 2000, the value will be a 3
digit number -- if the application software only expects a 2
digit year to come back, it will be surprised by a 3 digit
year that comes back then and will cause it to blow up.
Let me state this again, the C function for getting the system
date (I forget it now), I'll post it later; it returns the whole
time down to milliseconds, but the year portion is the number of
years since 1900. Hence today, it is '98'; in 2000, it will be
'100'. Again I'm talking about Unix, I don't know how different
the same call is with embedded system devices. I imagine they
are a lot the same. |
