Not long ago, I noticed that an important time-related function was missing from the Perl built-in function set. The manual says (for example):

Returns the number of non-leap seconds since whatever time the system considers to be the epoch

but it's hard to write reliable applications if you don't know what the system considers to be the epoch! It is a aprticularly large problem for applications that must be portable between platforms---you might port the program to a system with a different idea of the epoch, and then the program's interpretation of time values would be incorrect.

Anyway, I resolved to fix this, and recently submitted a patch for Perl 5.7.0. It adds a new epochtime function that returns the time at which the epoch occurs. Rather than post the entire patch here, I'll just provide a link.

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