date range

[juan_gandhi]

 I recently found I need to have dates in my posts before 01/01/1970. The reason being, I want to enter some diary records. I guess there may be other reasons for entering posts dated before 01/01/1970.

Had a discussion with support; they reasonably answered that 01/01/1970 00:00:00UTC is unix time zero.

The thing is, negative time does no harm; we can successfully go down to about Dec.13th, 1901 (as Wikipedia says). Maybe when we get closer to 2038, and 64-bit timestamps will make more urgent sense, we'll be able also to go down to ancient times, and record Roman or Egyptian history, but that's in the future.

I wonder how hard it would be to go ahead and widen the limits of timestamps. In my view, it must not be a big deal, right.

In our company, HealthExpense, now, unfortunately, nonexistent, we used this feature to mark patients dates of birth (since we had no patient born before December 1901). I think I even have some Scala classes for that, but have to ask whether they can be used. 

Anyway, dw is not written in Scala, but still, this can feature can be added as an experiment.

What do you think? 

(I've just joined this group, and this is my first post, so I might be missing something, please correct me in this case.)

Comments

[madgastronomer]

In all seriousness, if you've dealt with timestamps, why are you assuming this isn't a big deal?

[juan_gandhi]

In this specific case I feel like it won't be. Not in general settings. In general settings, like, suppose we need a duration - suddenly kaboom, we will need int64 if we have both negative and positive timestamps.

But do we have a duration anywhere in the codebase? Just comparing dates would be enough, right? But again, have to make sure that comparison works properly when we compare MIN_INT and MAX_INT. This is not guaranteed.

I don't see where else, beyond comparison and durations, we can have any kind of problems. Theoretically speaking.

[madgastronomer]

You don't think the massive legacy codebase could possibly cause problems, huh? In Perl, so probably not using exclusively C data types. And then there's the database schema! I know I'm not as experienced as you in a general sense, but I also know these things have tripped up devs here before on things that "should have been easy".

[juan_gandhi]

:) With Perl, anything can happen. Well, my codebase at Borland was in Perl, but... yes. I'd rather agree.