Portable general timestamp format, not 2038-limited

[James Harris]

On 3 Jul, 06:12, Scott David Daniels <scott.dani... at acm.org> wrote:
...
> Inspired format:
>      Days since a some standard date (the TAI date may be a good such
> date) expressed as fixed point 64-bit (32-bit day part, 32-bit
> day-fraction part) or floating point (using Intel's double-precision,
> for example, gives you 26 bits each for day and day-fraction, though
> the binary point moves for particular stamps).

This is close to or the same as my original suggestion. The break
between days and sub-days seems to make more sense than breaking the
fractional part elsewhere. It also gives a convenient point to hang
datestamps on rather than just timestamps.

FWIW I wonder if a 64-bit version of the above would cope with all
practical time needs. With that the time would range to +/- 9000
quintillion years (18 digits) and there would be over 200 trillion
ticks per second or 200 in a picosecond making, I think, each tick 5
femtoseconds.