Time Libraries Rough Draft

[Scott Turner]

On 2005 February 10 Thursday 07:19, Simon Marlow wrote:
> On 10 February 2005 12:12, Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk wrote:
> > And the simple fact that obtaining TAI from systems in use requires
> > periodic updates of the leap second table causes other difficulties.
>
> This is a vitally important bit of rationale which has emerged from the
> current discussion.  I certainly didn't fully appreciate the
> difficulties with basing the library on TAI before,

Another significant bit for me was the realization that TAI is no good for 
scheduling future events on an everyday calendar. If I schedule a new year's 
celebration for Jan 1, 2006, that would be represented in TAI as 1514764832.0 
seconds after the epoch. If a leap second is inserted at the end of 2005, 
then my celebration at 1514764832.0 TAI will be premature. Even if we go to 
the trouble of keeping our leap second tables current, this is still a 
problem.