Put all your time manipulation code in a module called Y2038::Problem ???

Seriously if you abstract your time code to a single location it will be easy to modify. But realistically Y2038 is only an issue if time_t is still a 4 byte int in 2038. It is quite reasonable to expect that 64 bit machines will be the norm and quite possibly 8 byte ints. In Perl there is unlikely to be a major issue as our use of time is abstracted from the raw 4 byte dependent time_t. As a result in Perl 6.01 in 2038 (Oh what a cynic) the basic time() function could quite easily be modified to return an 8 byte int into a Perl scalar and thus there is not real issue provided that the Perl was comiled with 8 byte int support, etc.

The ugly Y2K hack is to assume that times say < 2147483647 / 2 (make it a small a the number of extra years you want to wring out of your code) represents a rollover so proceed accordingly. This potentially gives you another 34 years worth of mileage out of it - assuming that there are not valid dates before 2004 you are processing in 2038 of course. You could facilitate such ugly hacks by putting all time functions in a module. ie 

# get the difference between two epoch times and cope with 2038
sub diff_time {
    my ( $begin, $end ) = @_;
    # for now all we need is:
  return $begin - $end;
    # Jan 19 03:14:07 2038 we have potential rollovers so
    require Math::BigInt;
    # blah
}

[download]

For those who might wonder why 2038..... 

my $zero_hour = 2**31 -1;
print "Zero hour is $zero_hour\n";
print scalar gmtime($zero_hour), "\n";
print gmtime($zero_hour+1) ? "OK" . scalar gmtime($zero_hour+1) : 'Oh 
+dear!';

[download]

cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print

In reply to Re: 2038 bug by tachyon
in thread 2038 bug by toma

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