Why does DateTime to Unix time use a double instead of an integer?

Posted by Earlz on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Earlz
Published on 2011-03-05T21:24:16Z Indexed on 2011/03/05 23:24 UTC
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I'm needing to convert a DateTime to a Unix timestamp. So I googled it looking for some example code

In just about all the results I see, they use double as the return for such a function, even when explicitly using floor to convert it to an integer. Unix timestamps are always integers. So what problem is there with using either long or int instead of double?

static double ConvertToUnixTimestamp(DateTime date)
{
    DateTime origin = new DateTime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0);
    TimeSpan diff = date - origin;
    return Math.Floor(diff.TotalSeconds);
}

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