Time Libraries Rough Draft

[Seth Kurtzberg]

Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote:

> Seth Kurtzberg wrote:
>
>> Timekeeping is crucial for certain applications, which happen to be 
>> the ones I work on. [...] If you ignore the realities of time (that 
>> is, that the universe isn't much interested in our simplifications) 
>> you get your satellite in the wrong place, and you lose $100 million. 
>> [...] If it's worth doing, don't return the wrong answer. [...] The 
>> universe doesn't stop for that period when POSIX pretends that it 
>> does. [...] Given the choice of reality or POSIX, it seems to me that 
>> reality is a more sensible choice.
>
>
> I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and 
> think things over.
>
> You want the library to do the Right Thing. Great, we all do. But it's 
> IMPOSSIBLE. If it were difficult, we would have just done it, and none 
> of this long discussion would have happened.
>
> What, precisely, do you want from a standard time library that Ashley 
> Yakeley's proposal could provide and doesn't? 

I want to compute the correct interval between two timestamps.  I guess 
I not only don't see why it's impossible, I don't even see why it is 
difficult.  The difficulty, if it exists, comes from converting the 
absolute time into calendar time, but even that isn't really difficult.  
The firmware in a GPS receiver does it.  So it is clearly not impossible.

> Do you want it to interface with a GPS receiver, or connect to an 
> Internet time server to get the current time? It doesn't make sense to 
> include such things in an initial proposal. Once we have some basic 
> datatypes for UTC and TAI times, then we can easily write other 
> libraries with the appropriate functions of type IO AbsoluteTime.

That's mixing apples and oranges.  I don't buy the argument that it is 
better to not handle both time representations until you have an IO 
class to fetch the representation.  Why is it unreasonable to ask the 
library to tell me the correct answer from, say, the current time to 
some time in the future?

Simon said there will be conversion functions between POSIX time and TAI 
time.  But the thread seems to be saying the reverse.  The thread also 
seems to be saying that, because we can't guarantee that a leap second 
table will be updated correctly, we should tolerate errors in time of up 
to 12 seconds (the current aggregated leap seconds).  I just don't see 
why that's necessary.

>
> -- Ben
>
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