System.Time.Clock Design Issues

Bayley, Alistair Alistair_Bayley at ldn.invesco.com
Thu Feb 3 10:14:58 EST 2005


I'm a bit worried that I'm not keeping up with this, so I'd like to clarify
some points for my own benefit:

=== The current time ===

 - UTC/POSIX/CalenderTime are isomorphic, and represent some idealised
notion of time where leap seconds don't exist i.e. a day always has duration
23:59:59.

 - Most (all?) system clocks return UTC. They may slow down around leap
seconds to support this - is this behaviour only seen on systems with NTP?

 - It's not possible to simply get the number of actual ticks since some
epoch; the OS time function may slow down for leap seconds and we can't
avoid this.

 - This means TAI time can only be calculated accurately when we have the
full leap second table available.


=== Durations ===

 - Duration calculations are feasible for UTC at any point, as they're
idealised.

 - Duration calculations are accurate for TAI only where we have the full
leap second table, again.

 - Timing an event using the system timer where the event duration
encompases a leap second will be inaccurate.

 - The duration between times A and B, where A->B encompass a leap second,
will be different between UTC and TAI: UTC will not count the leap second,
while TAI will include the leap second.

 - The duration between A and B, where both A & B are in the future (now + 6
months), will be the same in TAI and UTC because with TAI we won't know when
the leap seconds are, so we assume and idealised calendar.


Alistair.

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