In message <FB15E670DA55D51185350008C786514A0F90E139_at_sottexch1.cognos.com>, "Se
eds, Glen" writes:
>Hmm... there is certainly a problem when it comes to specifying legal time
>referring to the future: sun time is not predictable into the future with a
>high degree of precision. People wanting that kind of precision in legal
>documents would have two choices:
In my 20 years in the computing business, I have yet to see one
single instance where the duration until a future legal event was
specified with second precision. I have seen many instances where
the future legal event was locked to a legal time with second
precision.
The distinction is important it be aware off.
Contracts may run until "Noon, 12 december 2012", but they do not
run "for 252460800 seconds".
And I seriously do not belive that they will, until a lot of things
change radically, including wrist watches.
On the other hand, past events are routinely timestamped, sequenced
by these timestamps and time-intervals between them calculated with
sub-second precision.
I belive the same holds true for scientific applications: The
desire to be able to calculate a delta-T in a sane manner (ie:
without lookup tables) pertains almost exclusively to events already
in the past.
Poul-Henning
--
Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk_at_FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
Received on Mon Dec 22 2003 - 15:10:15 PST