File: coreutils.info,  Node: Authors of parse_datetime,  Prev: Specifying time zone rules,  Up: Date input formats

29.11 Authors of ‘parse_datetime’
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‘parse_datetime’ started life as ‘getdate’, as originally implemented by
Steven M. Bellovin () while at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  The code was later tweaked by a couple
of people on Usenet, then completely overhauled by Rich $alz
() and Jim Berets () in August, 1990.
Various revisions for the GNU system were made by David MacKenzie, Jim
Meyering, Paul Eggert and others, including renaming it to ‘get_date’ to
avoid a conflict with the alternative Posix function ‘getdate’, and a
later rename to ‘parse_datetime’.  The Posix function ‘getdate’ can
parse more locale-specific dates using ‘strptime’, but relies on an
environment variable and external file, and lacks the thread-safety of
‘parse_datetime’.

   This chapter was originally produced by François Pinard
() from the ‘parse_datetime.y’ source code, and
then edited by K. Berry ().