Concerning Time.TimeDiff

Dylan Thurston dpt@math.harvard.edu
Mon, 16 Jun 2003 18:56:05 +0200


On Mon, Jun 16, 2003 at 04:42:53PM +0100, Graham Klyne wrote:
> ... I think it's quite usual for people and applications to deal
> with a day as a consistent time interval without concern for
> possible leap seconds, so dealing with days as intervals of 24*60*60
> seconds is useful for a majority of applications that deal with such
> intervals.

What about the fact that days are not actually intervals of 24*60*60
seconds (as I'm sure you know)?  Most applications don't care, but
it's crucial to give correct and unsurprising results.

I'm worried that the complexity to deal with leap seconds will end up
being just as complicated as the complexity to deal with more general
TimeDiff's as in the current library, in which case it may be
necessary to bite the bullet and specify the behaviour of TimeDiffs
completely and accurately.

Peace,
	Dylan