Debian discusses how to handle 2038

Posted Feb 24, 2020 15:23 UTC (Mon) by matthias (subscriber, #94967)
In reply to: Debian discusses how to handle 2038 by ras
Parent article: Debian discusses how to handle 2038

I am impressed by the amount of serious discussion, I caused with that joke. I'll add a bit more to this discussion by remarking that 64 bits after the decimal are of cause not enough to represent the plank time, as the plank time is just a little bit larger than 2^-144 s. I'll add another stupid proposal: use 256-bit integers to represent all times as multiples of the plank time ;)

Debian discusses how to handle 2038

Posted Feb 24, 2020 22:05 UTC (Mon) by ras (subscriber, #33059) [Link] (2 responses)

> I caused with that joke.

LWN needs joke tags for people like me who are slow on the uptake.

> 2^-144 s

Yes, you are right of course. I got my bases confused.

256 bits does indeed have excellent properties. Perhaps the nicest is that if the lifetime of the universe ends up being finite it's likely it will cover the entire period in plank units, which means if could be a true final solution for all of time. But you end up 14 bytes to the left of the implied decimal point and 18 to the right which is downright ugly. I'd prefer the 256 bits on both sides of the decimal point symmetry that 512 bits gives us.

Debian discusses how to handle 2038

Posted Feb 27, 2020 7:55 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link] (1 responses)

>But you end up 14 bytes to the left of the implied decimal point and 18 to the right which is downright ugly

For integer time perhaps, but there are unsexy asymmetric splits in floating point. Which raises the question whether the machine running the multiverse program is actually having a global time counter, and whether that one will be using integer time to begin with.

Maybe the only reason the universe is expanding ever quicker is because it is running with FP somewhere where each step [i.e. `nextafter` C function] means a larger value the closer you approach MAX_FLT. ;-)

Debian discusses how to handle 2038

Posted Feb 27, 2020 22:57 UTC (Thu) by ras (subscriber, #33059) [Link]

So what you are saying is God used floating point instead of integer arithmetic. He did it for the same reason everybody does it - to avoid all having to think about how to handle all those nasty fractional bits. But as always they came back to bite him arse anyway, and the expanding Universe is the result.