In article
<3429668D0E777A499EE74A7952C382D1030DE110@EUR-MSG-01.europe.corp.microso
ft.com>,
"Simon Marlow"
I like the idea of having a single notion of absolute time, which is independent of TAI or UTC time. You can do arithmetic on absolute time (add/subtract absolute units of time, find absolute time differences), and convert to/from TAI and UTC.
My library happens to keep absolute time as TAI seconds since the epoch, but it doesn't have to. A representation using (days,ticks) sounds like it might be hard to do arithmetic on, though.
I think your ClockTime is a sensible way to represent absolute time for TAI. But we also need something that represents (for instance) "2008-08-03 11:00:00 UTC" even though we don't know what precise TAI time that will be. For this I would consider using a (days,ticks) pair: it allows you to do arithmetic such as "5 UTC days later" and end up with the expected answer even when there are intervening leap seconds. -- Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA