Mark Calabretta scripsit:
> If you go through the exercise trying to tie leap hours to DST, as I
> challenged, you will discover that it raises many questions that are not
> addressed by the leap hour proposal.
I realize the ALHP has severe problems with this, but I don't approve
of the ALHP anyhow (save perhaps tactically, as explained).
> If you make some plausible assumptions as to how it would operate, with
> DST starting and ending at the usual times of year and leap hours
> occurring on new year's eve, I believe you will find it far from simple
> to do in a rigorous fashion, and that at least one of the timescales is
> genuinely discontinuous.
Indeed. But the sensible approach would be for each State government to
fail to omit the hour of the normal spring transition in the year 2700,
say. In that way, AEDT would become TI+1000 and a normal-looking autumn
transition would cause AEST to become TI+0900. Countries without DST
transitions would have to actually repeat an hour, of course, just
as Algeria had to do in 1940, 1956, 1977, and 1981 (the country has
repeatedly flipflopped between UTC+0000 and UTC+0100).
By the way, I re-counted all the secular time zone transitions worldwide.
According to the Olson timezone database, there have been 516 of them
since the beginning of standard time (when that is, of course, varies
with the country or subdivision thereof).
--
John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan_at_ccil.org
Be yourself. Especially do not feign a working knowledge of RDF where
no such knowledge exists. Neither be cynical about RELAX NG; for in
the face of all aridity and disenchantment in the world of markup,
James Clark is as perennial as the grass. --DeXiderata, Sean McGrath
Received on Sun Jan 15 2006 - 21:40:45 PST