How long is long enough?

[Fred Wright]

On Sat, 25 Mar 2017, Hal Murray wrote:
> esr at thyrsus.com said:
> > I disagree with Fred, because 292 years is way too short an era.
>
> Will our code be around in 292 years?
>
> How long would it take to make you happy?
>
> I assume the answer depends on the context.  For something like POSIX, I'd
> prefer something longer than 292 years but might accept that if it solved the
> problem and seemed better/cleaner than the alternatives.
>
> For usage internal to a project like this, I'd be happy with 100 years.
> That's assuming it will go through various major changes over time.

It might change to something like 128-bit attoseconds some time within the
next 100 years, just by changing an internal scale factor.  That sure
beats keeping an arcane component format that makes every single
calculation more complicated.

BTW, the Linux kernel has generally been moving towards using 64-bit
nanoseconds internally, though there's still a lot of timespec cruft.

Fred Wright