Time

[Simon Marlow]

On 26 January 2005 00:27, Ashley Yakeley wrote:

> In article <5.1.0.14.2.20050125161230.02e21620 at 127.0.0.1>,
>  Graham Klyne <GK at ninebynine.org> wrote:
> 
>> I believe I'm in a minority and don't challenge the majority
>> decision, but I would prefer a date/time representation based on a
>> pair (days,ticks), where ticks is a count of some suitable fraction
>> of a second.  My reasons have been recorded here previously ... I'll
>> dig out a reference if anyone cares.
> 
> I think (days,ticks) might be worth examining for UTC time, since UTC
> has a variable number of seconds for each day (usually 86400, but may
> be one more or one less).

I like the idea of having a single notion of absolute time, which is
independent of TAI or UTC time.  You can do arithmetic on absolute time
(add/subtract absolute units of time, find absolute time differences),
and convert to/from TAI and UTC.

My library happens to keep absolute time as TAI seconds since the epoch,
but it doesn't have to.  A representation using (days,ticks) sounds like
it might be hard to do arithmetic on, though.

Cheers,
	Simon