Re: Broken date math on AppleScript 2.0
Re: Broken date math on AppleScript 2.0
- Subject: Re: Broken date math on AppleScript 2.0
- From: Philip Aker <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:58:25 -0800
On 2008-02-20, at 08:04:42, Axel Luttgens wrote:
Le 20 févr. 08 à 16:11, Mark J. Reed a écrit :
Yes, there is a bug in date conversion.
The problem seems to be somewhat subtler...
It was already noted by Donald back in November:
http://lists.apple.com/archives/applescript-users/2007/Nov/
msg00511.html
and I couldn't even decide at that time whether it is by accident
that real numbers came into the picture...
But one thing is sure: 10.5.2 hasn't addressed the issue. ;-)
But there's nothing wrong with AS using 29-bit integers,
especially since it automatically (and mostly seamlessly) promotes
to floating point as needed to represent bigger numbers.
Right; moreover, the language's specification clearly states the fact.
Maybe that was good enough in 1992, but not anymore. And just because
you two happen to think that unwarranted integer->float promotion is
ok doesn't make it correct.
These days, XML rules. The bottom line is exact interchange with XML
data-types. I'm sure the AppleScript team could fix it in a flash but
the source of this problem is that CFNumber/NSNumber (OS X native
number "classes") don't have unsigned types (nor OSTypes as a storage
classification). This means that any coordination of AppleScript
unsigned number types to the native number types entails a loss of
information. Consequently, AppleScript is still _forced_ to waste 2
bits for the sign. That's not acceptable for matching up to the
bottom line international standard. If you read through the links to
CFDate I posted previously, you will have noted also how AppleScript
is living in the past by still passing DateTimeRec in AppleEvents.
Philip Aker
echo email@hidden@nl | tr a-z@. p-za-o.@
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