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Re: 2038 bugby mattr (Curate) |
on Apr 13, 2003 at 15:17 UTC ( [id://250139]=note: print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
You are referring to this problem I think.. $ perl -e 'print scalar localtime time*3;' Thu Sep 28 21:26:38 1933 Ouch!
There are some interesting pages at: The last link has specific advice for your case: "What can be done?"But the above rollover will only happen if you are using the same perl on the same machine/OS/BIOS, I think. The source code of your program would not have to change if it is interpreted by a (yet to be created?) more modern version of perl. That said, it would be nice if we had a way to explain perl modules to programs with an aim to automated software integration. Some keywords- "web annotation","syntactic web", "natural language processing" will probably be full grown by then (see some in google directory). But that seems to be in early stages, we could use something perlish or corbaish even now. So I think your question is very relevant to us now too. Even with today's technology we should be able to describe characteristics of our programs in a way that a machine can understand. Also, there is currently no standardized way of describing Y2.038K problems. Ultimately things like failure modes of 2038-challenged unix software and embedded systems can be described with some kind of interface description language - maybe perl is good for this (Consider perl Makefile.PL as a forerunner). That way we can hope that when nearly every piece of hardware in existence today crashes and burns, the important things can be virtualized on 64+ bit machines that scan these descriptions of dead systems and rescue us. Doesn't seem like science fiction to me.. Anyway I would like to see something more parseable in manpages and whatnot, perldocs could gain another section for machine-readable descriptions too. Anyway to directly answer your question (how to annotate your program) maybe it would be useful to put tags in comments to indicate dangerous lines, and provide a separate file which describes the problems. You could also try describing exactly what is dangerous about it in simplified english inside <Y2.038K> </Y2.038K> tags, it might just work!
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