Re: Sniping on the List

On Nov 17, 2011, at 10:33 AM, Tedd Sperling <tedd.sperling@gmail.com> wrote:

On Nov 17, 2011, at 11:07 AM, Stuart Dallas wrote:

On 17 Nov 2011, at 16:01, Tedd Sperling wrote: To all:

Okay, so now that we have had people reply, here's my take. The Unix timestamp started on 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 -- and that was a Thursday. The second before (i.e., 31 December, 1969 23:59:59:59 + 0000) was null, which was Wednesday.

I take issue with this. The second before was -1 seconds from the epoch. Null is the absence of a value, so you can't get to null by simple arithmetic. I learnt about negative numbers from the Greeks. And no, I'm not going to comment on their current mathematical difficulties. Hmm. D'oh! But the point still stands: -1 !== null. -Stuart

Leave it to you to get all Greek on me. :-) Consider this -- do you think the second before the "Big Bang" was negative or null? Likewise, the Unix timestamp was defined to start at a specific point in time -- it does not address/define what time came before. Thus, what came before was not negative, but rather 'undefined'. I claim 'null' is a better fit for 'undefined' than negative -- plus it works. For example, if you push '-1' though strtotime(-1), you'll get Wednesday only one day a week -- whereas 'null' works every time. My point stands: null == Wednesday. :-) Cheers, tedd _____________________ tedd@sperling.com http://sperling.com -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php

As I clearly demonstrated, that depends on where you're standing :)