“Now, what about Perl? Is Perl “Year 2000 Compliant”? The
answer is that Perl is every bit as Y2K compliant as is your
pencil; no more, and no less. Does that comfort you? It
shouldn’t. Just as you can commit Y2K transgressions with your
pencil, so too you can do so with Perl–or with any other tool, for
that matter. You don’t really even have to go very far out of your
way to do so; witness the demonstration of the perfectly compliant
cal program provided above.”
“The date and time functions supplied with Perl are the gmtime()
and localtime() functions, which are derived from their namesakes
in the C programming language. These supply adequate information to
determine the year well beyond 2000. 2038 is when trouble strikes,
but only for those of us then still stuck on 32-bit machines, a
somewhat unlikely albeit admittedly not entirely unthinkable
situation.”