Time Library Organisation

[Ketil Malde]

Keean Schupke <k.schupke at imperial.ac.uk> writes:

> I would think that Time should be fudge-factor free... simply a number
> of milliseconds after the epoch...

A timestamp may even be an opaque value, as long as you can get the
difference (in seconds and fraction of) between two time stamps, and
convert it to calendar data.  (Perhaps it would also be nice to output
a timestamp directly in some format?)  So it may not need to be
specified. 

Or is it necessary to be able to store and retrieve (the internal
representation of) timestamps? 

It then doesn't *really* matter whether the internal format uses TAI
or UTC, but time differences in UTC must be compensated for leap
seconds (so that computations don't go faster or slower because of
them).

-kzm
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants