Moving CURRENT-DATE to a field ends up calling CLOCK and CALENDAR. Using
FUNCTION CURRENT-DATE returns not only the date, but the time and time
zone information. It calls HPGMTSECS, gmtime, localtime and then
sprintf's all of this into your buffer.

John Zoltak
North American Mfg Co

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ray Potts [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Thursday, March 26, 1998 4:22 AM
> To:   [log in to unmask]
> Subject:      [HP3000-L] Current Date
>
> We were doing doing some performance testing on a cobol program and
> found that it seemed to take a long time to get the current date using
> the function current-date call.  We then created a test program which
> simply does a 'move current-date' 10,000 times and then a 'move
> function current-date' 10,000 times.  We found the difference in the
> amount of time it takes to make these calls significant. Has anyone
> else noticed this and do you know of a reason?
>
>
> Call                 CPU       Count   Time/call     Wall
> ===================================================================
> CURRENT-DATE          0.35     10000      0.35          1
> FUNCTION CURRENT     13.20     10000     13.20         55
> ===================================================================
> cpu: parent user =   14.18  system =    0.00
> wall seconds (since first starttime call): 58
>
>
> Ray Potts