OpenVMS 8.3-1H1 manual and $gettim

[Max Bruno Jarvis]

The online documentation that comes with OpenVMS 8.3-1H1 says $gettim returns the time as "the number of nanoseconds since 17 November 1858". This conflicts with older manuals, and in fact doesn't appear to be true: as on older versions of OpenVMS, $gettim returns the number of 100-nanosecond units, not the number of nanoseconds. Anybody know anything about this? Is it just a mistake in the 8.3-1H1 manual, or is there more to it? (This is on I64, rx2660.)

[Hoff · Accepted solution]

What's posted is somewhere between confusing and wrong.

Report it to HP directly, and they might get a fix into V8.4.

[Volker Halle]

Max,

this seems to be a day-0 bug in the documentation ! Even the OpenVMS V7.3 system service manual has this wrong explanation for the $GETTIM system service.

The Programming Concepts manual contains a correct explanation in Chapter 27.1 System Time Format.

Volker.

[Max Bruno Jarvis]

The only paper manual I have is for OpenVMS-AXP v1.5 and OpenVMS-Vax v6.0, dating from 1993. That one gets it right as regards the 100-nanosecond units, though it doesn't mention 17 November 1858, it just calls it "system base time".

[RBrown_1]

The V7.1 documentation is correct as well.

[Clarete Riana]

Hi,

100-nanosecond units is the correct value. The documentation for 8.3-1H1 is a mistake.

Thanks for pointing this out. We will work on correcting this for V8.4.

Regards,
Clarete