Akademik

n.

A computer software bug that will cause programs to cease functioning properly when confronted with dates in the year 2038 and beyond.

"First it was Y2K. Then the Euro conversion. And now, as if the Y2K and Euro problems weren't bad enough, there's the year 2038 bug. Dr. GUI got a letter from Mahmoud Saleh alerting him (reminding him, actually) of a similar problem that will face C and C++ programmers in coming years: we can call it the Y2.038K bug.

The problem stems from the common definition of the time_t as an integer containing the number of seconds since midnight, January 1, 1970. Most C/C++ runtime libraries define time_t as a long int. On most systems, long int is 32 bits, which means that we've got a range of 2^31-1 (2,147,483,647) seconds — until sometime on January 18, 2038. (Assuming Dr. GUI's Windows CE Palm-size PC has it right, that's a Monday. Figures.)

Since the number is signed, when the clock rolls over the time will be a very large negative number, giving us a time warp of a little over 136 years — we'll flip back to sometime late in December, 1901."

— Dr. GUI, "All Ready for 2000 and the Euro? What About 2038?," MSDN Online Buzz