date

convention, data A string unique to a time duration of 24

hours between 2 successive midnights defined by the local time

zone. The specific representation of a date will depend on

which calendar convention is in force; e.g., Gregorian,

Islamic, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew etc. as well as local

ordering conventions such as UK: day/month/year, US:

month/day/year.

Inputting and outputting dates on computers is greatly

complicated by these localisation issues which is why they

tend to operate on dates internally in some unified form such

as seconds past midnight at the start of the first of January

1970.

Many software and hardware representations of dates allow only

two digits for the year, leading to the year 2000 problem.

Unix manual page: date(1), ctime(3).

(1997-07-11)