On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 01:38:12AM -0700, Ashley Yakeley wrote:
Also, it would be nice if the LeapSecondTable was not a functional type, but rather something with structure, like a list of (year,offset) pairs. There could be apps that will have to look at which years the leap seconds actually occured in and probing the function with every possible value in its domain is not very fun.
That's a good question. I used a function because that's the "least" type necessary to do the conversions, at the same time allowing estimates extending infinitely into the future (and past, if we want "proleptic UTC"). A list of pairs would have to be walked through, in effect converted to the function type.
How about making LeapSecondTable an abstract type and having functions for converting to and from a list based representation? then it could use whatever efficient representation it wants internally and we still have the ability to get at or provide the raw data. However, you raise a good point about implementations that 'estimate' infinitly far into the future or the past, not sure what to do about those. John -- John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈