See this LongNow article [1]. While I love the sentiment behind it, it creates an implicit fixed-length field which I think is not optimistic enough.

I'd rather make software handle an unsigned long long as a year: I want our optimism to extend beyond the presumed heat death of our universe, and into, if not finding a multiverse, creating it.

[1] https://longnow.org/ideas/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-di...

Long long isn't nearly long enough to get to the heat death of the universe.

Thank you for the correction. We currently think heat death is around 10^3247 years, so we're back to Lisp bignum to express years. Might be a corollary to Greenspun's tenth rule: any sufficiently optimistic date package contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of Common Lisp bignum?

It's to get people to ask that question.

It's his conceit.