LabVIEW
What's with 12AM Friday January 01, 1904?
Normally I would chastise a user for resurecting a 8 year old thread. But I'm so glad you did, there are some interesting reads in this thread that I would have otherwise missed. Thanks.
@jasonhill wrote:
Earlier than that. The 32-bit date will overflow sometime around 2040. Then we can party like its 1904!
Just so nobody does get a wrong idea. This was when LabVIEW used a U32 as timestamp value since MacOS used that too. They did however change that to a double precision floating point number quite early on, which doesn't have that limit anymore. A double precision floating point has an almost indefinite upper range for this, although the precision will get less accurate, eventually being less precise than one second at around 2^53 seconds from January 1, 1904, which is some 250'000'000 years from now.
But in LabVIEW 7 they decided that this was not enough and introduced the new timestamp datatype. That one can address +-2^63 seconds from 1904 and that is about +-250 billion years and has a theoretical resolution of 1/(2^32) seconds. It has 64 bits for the fractional part but the lower 32 bits are not used as far as I can tell.
