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From: Keith Thompson <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: "A diagram of C23 basic types"
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2025 15:56:56 -0700
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:
> On Mon, 14 Apr 2025 13:36:07 -0500, BGB wrote:
>> On 4/14/2025 12:40 PM, candycanearter07 wrote:
>>> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote at 04:33 this Monday (GMT):
>>>> I worked out that an integer of a little over 200 bits is sufficient
>>>> to represent the age of the known Universe in units of the Planck
>>>> interval (5.39e-44 seconds). Therefore, rounding to something more
>>>> even, 256 bits should be more than enough to measure any physically
>>>> conceivable time down to that resolution.
>>> 
>>> The problem then becomes storing that size.
>> 
>> More practical is storing the time in microseconds.
>
> Relative to what epoch?
>
> I figured that it would be hard to find an epoch less arbitrary than the 
> Big Bang ...

Why??

That would not be practical or useful.  The timing of the Big Bang
is not known with great precision; the epoch would be "what we
guessed the time of the Big Bang to be when we standardized this".

You'd need about 59 bits to store the number of seconds since the
Big Bang.  Storing microseconds or nanoseconds would require more
than 64 bits.

Huge numbers of systems already use the perfectly reasonable POSIX
epoch, 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC.  I can think of no good reason to
standardize anything else.

-- 
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com
void Void(void) { Void(); } /* The recursive call of the void */