Pondering 2038

Posted Aug 16, 2013 21:53 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: Pondering 2038 by tmattox
Parent article: Pondering 2038

"short" time differences can be represented very precisely,

If you're talking about differences between datetimes represented in this format, the additional precision for short differences does you no good because you're limited by the precision of the datetimes you're subtracting.

If one were going to use a floating point datetime format in order to avoid catastrophic failure in the distant future, one probably should make the epoch 2013 instead of 1970. At least that would make the high-precision era a more useful one. Or maybe 2100, guessing that finer time precision will be more useful with future technology.