Behold the evil of Microsoft
Mar. 7th, 2003 05:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
The classic UNIX way of keeping track of the current time is the number of seconds since midnight UTC, January 1, 1970. Win32 has a notion of “file time”, which is the number of 100-second intervals since midnight UTC, January 1, 1601. Now, a sensible thing for them to do would be to provide a constant for converting from one to the other, defined in a header file so you could just refer to it by name. (You can also do it by calling various functions, but there are times when you’d rather not pay the overhead of a function call.) Do Microsoft provide this constant? Not in a header file. It’s in the frelling MSDN documentation, but it’s not someplace that a programmer can refer to it where other programmers can recognize it as a predefined name.