Re: [LEAPSECS] Mechanism to provide tai-utc.dat locally

From: John Cowan <cowan_at_ccil.org>
Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2006 13:34:27 -0500

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

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