Times farthest in the past and farthest in the future that can be represented?
Is it absolute moments in time, or distance in time from the present moment?
I couldn't find it in the docs for the Time class.
Does it depend on the system? If so, how can I access it in my code?
UPDATE
After some experimentation, I found that it's from about 108 years in the past to about 29 years in the future. Still wondering if it's system dependent.
"Time is stored internally as the number of seconds and microseconds since the epoch, January 1, 1970 00:00 UTC. On some operating systems, this offset is allowed to be negative."
So clearly its an abosolute time not relative to now
Sounds like there is a "C" time implementation under cover (integers can be signed or unsigned depending on OS / processor / compiler) : it means the bounds are system dependent.
But if you need to handle dates that are that long ago / far in the future, I guess you won't really need the "time of day" part and can use a Date !?
DateTime (in the Date library, included with ruby) goes back to 1 January 4713 BCE and farther into the future than you are likely to need.