🚀 go-pugleaf

I've been tasked to look into date-time manipulation routines available
on VAX C.  

What I have found: time, ftime, ctime, asctime, difftime, clock, 
                   localtime, gmtime.

What is not available on my VAX C compiler: mktime, strftime.

My question is - the "time" routine can get the current time and I can
                 further break that down using "localtime", but how do
                 I convert a time residing in a string, e.g., "May 12, 1991"
                 into an internal representation?  There does not seem to
                 be any routines taking STRINGs and going "backward" to
                 an internal time, and for some reason "mktime", which
                 takes a broken down (into a struct) time and converts it
                 to an internal representation (number of seconds since
                 Jan 1, 1970), is not included in my run-time library.
                 
Please excuse my general ignorance about C (it is new to me).  How do
other people deal with formatted time conversions?  

Thanks.
--

 Lloyd Chalfant - These opinions are borrowed so be nice to them!