Re: [bug-gnulib] time64: 64-bit variants of gmtime, mktime, localtime etc?

[James Youngman]

On 3/8/07, Bruno Haible <address@hidden> wrote:
> Paul Eggert wrote:
> > Clearly you don't write financial applications dealing with 30-year
> > bonds.  :-)
>
> So you want that 'time64_t' type to be useful specifically for financial
> applications? I'm wondering because
>
>    - For computing interests in finance, you rarely need more precision
>      than 12 hours. Why 1 sec precision then?

Worse than that, perhaps.  You can't usually store intervals as
time64_t values (or whatever).  If (say) a bond matures at date/time
X, X will normally be in local time in some juristiction.  The
relevant instant should be determined at date/time X, as opposed to
the instant we thought X would occur given some 30 year out-of-date
set of daylight savings time rules.  So, many types of time/date
information are best stored as a broken-down time, with timezone
information.  Partly for this reason, databases often do that.

James.