2012/5/18 David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com>:
> 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
>
>
You posted one year too soon ;)

Nicolas