File: [107,113]HELP.HLP            Last Edit: 10-FEB-1987 11:46:20 

These are the files relating to the CLUNK routine that we put on
the Fall86 RSX SIG tape.  README.CLU explains it.

I have put these on this disk so that Pete Stadick can look at them.

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The clunk date is interesting to us in three areas.  The first area
is DEC time representation used by DATATRIEVE and VAX/VMS.  Any interfacing
that we do with files produced by DATATRIEVE or VMS, will require
us to be able to work with clunk date.  The second area is the
concept of a continuous date/time stamp with fine resolution.  It
would be useful for recording events, and determining time differences
between events.  The third area is the concept of the 64 bit integer.
Pascal-2 can only work with 16 bit integers and  Fortran77 with 32 bit
integers.  The ability to manipulate 64 bit integers would permit us
to represent very large numbers while retaining ones digit accuracy
and not having to resort to ascii digit representation.  

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At some point in time, we need a Pascal-2 routine that can access
these with names like CCLTDA (Convert CLunk date to dec DAte)
and CDATCL (Convert dec DAte to CLunk date).

Likewise, it would be interesting to look at the 64 bit integer add
and subtract routines contained in CLUNK.MAC, and the constants for
minutes, days, hours and the like.  Its possible we could use these
to come up with routines that could give us the elapsed time between
two clunk dates, or to compute the clunk date that is equal to the
current clunk date plus 10 minutes.

Other useful spinoffs might be 64 bit integer compare (which is greater),
or 64 bit integer multiply and divide, or maybe even, conversion routines
from ascii represented number to 64 bin integer, and visa versa.


