[time-nuts] Could computers represent the timestamp differently?

Hal Murray hmurray at megapathdsl.net
Fri Dec 23 14:53:26 EST 2016


petervince1952 at gmail.com said:
> It seems to me that the major problem with the leap-second is the inability
> of current computer operating systems to represent it, and this is due to
> their using a second count since 1970 rather than writing it out as we would
> by hand.

Your suggestion doesn't solve the problem.  It just pushes it over to another 
corner.

There are two things you want to do with an internal format time.  One is to 
convert it to a human friendly date/time.   The other is to do arithmetic - 
how long is it from X to Y.

You have made the conversion to human format easy.  But it is now hard to 
convert to something like TAI seconds since X so you can subtract 2 time 
stamps.


-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.





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