Zefram scripsit:
> In the general case: to determine or use an interval of N calendar FOOs,
> it is convenient to represent the time as a linear count of calendar
> FOOs plus details of the exact position within the current FOO. FOO may
> be minute, hour, day, week, month, or year. I think there should be
> record formats for all of these cases (the native UTC format is one
> of these with FOO = day), with conversion functions between them and
> also a linear count of seconds.
That's overkill. If we confine ourselves to the Gregorian calendar,
a time interval can be safely represented as a triple of months,
minutes, and seconds. All time units longer than a month contain
a fixed and integral number of months, and all time units larger
than a minute and smaller than a month contain a fixed and integral
number of minutes. (If we don't care about leap seconds, shock
horror, we can just use months and seconds.)
--
The man that wanders far cowan_at_ccil.org
from the walking tree http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
--first line of a non-existent poem by: John Cowan
Received on Wed Dec 27 2006 - 10:34:51 PST