[ntp:hackers] tvtoa() and utvtoa()

David L. Mills mills at udel.edu
Tue Jun 22 03:28:37 UTC 2010


Harlan,

When Dennis Ferguson wrote those routines for an embedded processor that 
had no mutliply/divide instructions. He devised a clever way to convert 
between NTP and Unix representation based on table-lookup. The routines 
you cite were part of that stash, mainly for debugging. When I rewrote 
the contraption using floating point, the tables were trashed, but those 
routines have been unused for the last eighteen years. Verily, the 
routines can be burned.

Dave

Harlan Stenn wrote:

>Linus Karlsson was working on his GSoC Unit Testing project and
>discovered tvtoa.c and utvtoa.c, and noticed that those functions are
>not referenced anywhere in the code.
>
>I did not find *any* historical use of those functions, either.
>
>Anybody know what they might be good for?
>
>Should we just remove them?
>
>I figure there is a chance they may be good for debug output, maybe.
>
>  
>



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