[hiAndrewQuinn]

Instant bookmark for me. I've always loved the idea of measuring time in computers by a single integer like the timestamp does, but it always seems like such a pain to work with outside of that.

[bloopernova]

This might interest you, if you haven't already seen it: Unix timestamp clock, in hex! https://retr0.id/stuff/2038/

[3np]

FWIW these bash shortcuts are handy if you do this a lot:

    tss() { date -Is -u -d @$1 ; }
    tsm() { date -Ins -u -d @$( echo "scale=3; $1 / 1000" | bc) | sed -E -e 's/[0-9]{6}\+/\+/' -e 's/,/./' ; }
    tsn() { date -Ins -u -d @$( echo "scale=9; $1 / 1000000000" | bc) | sed 's/,/./' ; }

    $ tss 1700000000
    2023-11-14T22:13:20+00:00

    $ tsm 1700000000000
    2023-11-14T22:13:20.000+00:00

    $ tsn 1700000000000000000
    2023-11-14T22:13:20.000000000+00:00

[anyfoo]

Because the bases are all wrong. Common number bases are 10, 16, maybe 8 if you live in the 70s, and 2.

Except for the utterly unwieldy binary, none of those bases adapt well to the bases used in representing time, which are mostly the (partially related) bases 60, 12, and, annoyingly, thirty-ish.

So you always end up doing opaque arithmetic instead of “just looking at the digits” (which you still can do in decimal for century vs years for example, because we defined centuries to be exactly that).

[PrimeMcFly]

> I've always loved the idea of measuring time in computers by a single integer like the timestamp does

Why?