parse_datetimeparse_datetime started life as getdate, as originally
implemented by Steven M. Bellovin
(smb@research.att.com) 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 (rsalz@bbn.com)
and Jim Berets (jberets@bbn.com) 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 (pinard@iro.umontreal.ca) from the parse_datetime.y source code, and then edited by K. Berry (kb@cs.umb.edu).