RE: Time

On 26 January 2005 00:27, Ashley Yakeley wrote:

In article <5.1.0.14.2.20050125161230.02e21620@127.0.0.1>, Graham Klyne wrote:

...

I believe I'm in a minority and don't challenge the majority decision, but I would prefer a date/time representation based on a pair (days,ticks), where ticks is a count of some suitable fraction of a second. My reasons have been recorded here previously ... I'll dig out a reference if anyone cares.

I think (days,ticks) might be worth examining for UTC time, since UTC has a variable number of seconds for each day (usually 86400, but may be one more or one less).

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. Cheers, Simon