Standard C Date/Time Library: Programming the World's Calendars and Clocks - Softcover

Latham, Lance

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0879304960 ISBN 13: 9780879304966

Publisher: CRC Press, 1998

Synopsis

Does the year 2000 have you sweating late-night code? Use our complete library of C programming functions to master Y2K, time on the Net, ISO 8601, time stamp compression, or any other time/date application you encounter. Using the astronomers Julian Day'

About this title

Review

Lance Latham's Standard C Date/Time Library aims to solve the problem with time and calendars on computers. This book publishes the author's C library with functions (included on CD-ROM) for many of the world's calendars, interspersed with some truly fascinating historical material that makes sense of humankind's myriad attempts to get a handle on time.

The Standard C Date/Time Library begins with a description of the Y2K problem. The author then proceeds to show that definitions of years, months, and days are subject to different standards, many of which are the result of "applied astronomy." He develops his comprehensive solution using the Julian calendar and represents hours and minutes as fractions of days. His Standard C Date/Time Library (STDTL) offers extremely comprehensive functionality, allowing you to calculate differences between days and days of the week, as well as calculations for holidays.

The author intersperses source code listings with wide-ranging descriptions of calendars and their inconsistencies. For the treatment of the Western calendar and ISO 8601 standard time functions, this code library is worth it. However, the author goes much further and offers code for and descriptions of all the major calendars of the world, including non-Western calendars and ancient calendar systems. --Richard Dragan

About the Author

Lance Latham is the principal of Resource Management Systems, Inc., a software development firm in McAllen, Texas, and has been programming on a wide range of platforms for three decades. Although he has programmed in more languages than he wants to count, Lance now primarily codes in C for developing systems that manage critical resources in enterprises ranging from health care to jewelry marketing.

Edition details

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0879304960
• ISBN 13: 9780879304966
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 560