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Scientists and engineers who are using C or migrating to C and need a package of C routines for date/time applications that does not involve writing, or contracting to write, a library of routines. |
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The package is general enough to cover most common needs and powerful enough to adequately treat most applications, without the need to resort to custom code or suffer through a lengthy learning curve. |
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Students learning C can benefit from studying a group of routines that cover a common application area. |
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The application is common enough to be easily understood. The approach followed illustrates the importance of planning a set of data structures and algorithms to work together in an application area, without being too abstruse or narrow in focus. Finally, the student can use these routines in his studies and later work and add to them as his knowledge grows. |
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Programmers familiar with procedural languages other than C. SCDTL deliberately uses a standard subset of C that contains procedural structures common to many languages. Features peculiar to C are deliberately avoided. The routines may be translated to other languages with much less difficulty than might be normally expected with C source code. |
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A more diverse group of people, who are not conversant with C, or with programming languages, can also profit from this book. This group includes students of calendrics, historians, and even archeologists. The book provides a standard set of tools which organizes a large amount of calendric material in a systematic, and automated, way. |
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The book corrects a number of errors in published texts, organizes calendric material, and provides a set of tools that may be used for research. The assistance of a programmer familiar with C would be required by a worker who wanted to use the routines themselves in novel ways. |
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The book addresses a very clear need for an integrated tool kit in the area of date/time applications. |
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In many areas (e.g., mathematics), programmers have long accepted the wisdom of using a package of standard routines to handle standard situations. Few would see an advantage in designing, coding, debugging, and testing a Fast Fourier Transform routine, for example. |
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The date/time area, however, has long suffered from the absence of such an integrated tool kit for several reasons: |
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1. Universal need. At some point, virtually every programmer has a need to write or use date/time functions. All human endeavor occurs in the context of time. |
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