581: Mainline

To work with time, you use the time and localtime functions. The time function asks your operating system how many seconds have elapsed since the beginning of 1970, and the localtime function uses that number of seconds to fill structure variables in a time-structure object:

Operating system 
      | 
      | time 
      | 
      v 
  Big integer       <-- Holds elapsed seconds since  
      |                 beginning of 1970 
      | localtime 
      | 
      v 
Structure object    <-- Contains structure variables for 
                        year, month, day, hour, minute, 
                        and other time indicators