David Heffernan

You are concentrating on the time zone, but that's not your issue at all. When you get time from somewhere, you will be able to convert to UTC because you will know the time zone associated with the time. Your problem seems to be that you want to use an authorative time source. You should do research on that rather than worrying about time zone conversion.

What source do you want to use for the time, given that you've ruled out the local computer?

"I need to have XXX translated to YYY" seems a little abrupt to me.

What pay rate are you offering?

Log the floating point control word and see if it is the same in the two programs.

Use a list view. Part of problem solving is exploring the problem space and finding the best solution, given the pros and cons of all possible options. Deciding on the solution first and then trying to force it to work is not the way to solve problems.

Nothing fundamentally wrong with your option 1, so long as that is the single place where those string literals are written. The array does have the useful benefit of leading to helpful compiler error when enums extended, as discussed. But yeah, none of these options is especially terrible. I'd actually rate option 2 as the worst.

What's your definition of magic string?

Speed isn't the issue. The mistake that you make again and again. Maintainability is the only concern here.

So, the answer is a definitive no. Yeah, you are right, I just assumed that typed constants would be placed in read only memory, as they are in other tool chains. Oh well.

Aren't they placed in read only memory?

Attribute syntax demands true constants

Given this definition type Real = Double; I'd say you don't have much to fear. Of course, this code doesn't compile.

Why do this in a thread? Seems like much complexity for no possible gain.

It's not going to be sent many messages. Can you reproduce the behaviour in a cut down program?