[Gretl-users] Re: strptime() and Win vs Unix

Unix-type systems treat this epoch time as a signed integer, so negative offsets relative to midnight of 1969-12-31/1970-01-01 can be represented. MS Windows treats it as an unsigned integer and so cannot handle prior dates. If you think about it for a moment, it's clear that figuring the offset in seconds of a given date from a given benchmark (the aforementioned start of 1970) is not at all trivial -- think of leap seconds, never mind leap years. So I doubt there's anything we can do about this other than post a warning.