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### 7.11 Authors of `parse_datetime`

`parse_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).