On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 08:59:35PM -0400, David T. Lewis wrote:
> On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 04:01:11PM -0700, Eliot Miranda wrote:
> 
> >  Why not just define the Smalltalk epoch properly?
> 
> Because after more than 10 years of answering questions about this stuff
> over and over, it would be really nice to be able to simply refer people
> to the relevant Wikipedia page, where the concepts are properly documented
> and clearly explained.

I realized that I am probably coming across as a bit snarky with a remark
like this, sorry.

For background, Lex Spoon (with some help from me) proposed a good solution
to handle local versus UTC time back in early 2000. Squeak was based on
local time (both in the VM and in the image), so the idea was to provide
a primitive with time and offset in an atomic call, such that UTC clock values
would be available while providing the traditional local clock for compatibility
in the existing image.

  http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2000-February/020249.html

The primitiveUtcWithOffset primitive in the interpreter VM is based on Lex
Spoon's original proposal.
	"Answer an array with UTC microseconds since the Posix epoch and
	the current seconds offset from GMT in the local time zone.
	This is a named (not numbered) primitive in the null module (ie the VM)"

I take an interest in the topic because of this posting from 1999, which I
personally consider to be the most important thing that I have contributed
to Squeak over the years:

  http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1999-December/005327.html

Dave