On 2005-07-06, John Meacham
But the beauty of TAI is that interval and absolute times are on the same scale.
True, but so what?
I would argue that it is the one type where arithmetic actually makes sense. you can subtract two dates and get an absolute measure of the time difference between them.
Check.
or add two dates and get the sum of their offsets from 1970. (there is a zero time, the TAI epoch).
Never useful. The type system should be used to prevent it.
Even division and multiplication make sense (but the dimensionalities are a little more iffy with them, so I'd convert to integers first, however the math is sound).
The conversion to integers should be explicit.
For TAI, you don't need separate Difference and Absolute types because in essence, all TAI values are offsets, with an implied endpoint at 1970-1-1 0:0:0.
False, and true. This is essentially the different between an affine space and a vector space -- an affine space, such as points are a torsor for the corresponding vector space of durations. The numeric classes need to be more fine grained. -- Aaron Denney -><-