Re: Leap Seconds

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

Yeah - once you're talking just seconds, that's fine because you are now in
relative time WRT some epoch. However, once you go to calendar time, you've
got a problem. Consider that we agree to meet on March 1. If you count leap
years and I don't, won't we have a difference in what the number of days is
between now and March 1? So if your epoch is 1/6/80-00:00:00 and my epoch is
1/1/96-00:00:00, how many seconds are between those to epochs? Won't it
matter if you count leap-seconds (leap-years?) or not? Naturally, being both
in the past, the conversion is a constant value. But what if I need to know
the seconds between either of those epochs and some date way in the future?
Unlike leap-years, leap-seconds are not predictable.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Robert A Duff" <bobduff@world.std.com> wrote in message
news:wccsnhme0pd.fsf@world.std.com...
> I don't get it.  If we both agree on when the epoch is, and we have a
> way of counting seconds since the epoch, then we can agree to meet for
> beer at 1,234,567,890.0 seconds after the epoch.  It doesn't matter that
> my clock shows a different time than yours (because I count leap seconds
> and you don't, or because I don't believe in "nightdark wasting time",
> or because we're in different time zones, or whatever).