The epoch typically refers to Unix time, "a system for describing instants in time, defined as the number of seconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), Thursday, 1 January 1970, not counting leap seconds." If you have two date/time values in different time zones, you can convert them both to Unix time and compare them easily, since they're both just a number of seconds in a common time system. As for @skipping, @printing and %pending, there's a big comment block describing those directly in the code, and individual comments on just about every operation on those variables, so I'm not really sure what further explanation you are looking for? Is there a specific operation you are not clear on?

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