Re: What do I use if not `float-time'?

[Davis Herring]

> Okay, so what do I use instead? I just want a "UNIX timestamp" as an
> integer or string. What's the idiomatic way to get that?

Use `current-time'.  The trick is that you then have to deal with multiple
integers (because Emacs ints are (often) shorter than 32 bits). 
`float-time' exists to avoid that inconvenience at the cost of another. 
In practice, using the integer parts of calls to (float-time) should be
fine so long as you don't do too much arithmetic on them: doubles have 53
bits of mantissa, and so can represent any reasonable traditional
(integer) time stamp exactly.

To get a string version of the integer part (which you can't safely turn
into an integer!), you can just use (format-time-string "%s").

Davis

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