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From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@world.std.com>
Subject: Re: Leap Seconds
Sender: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)
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Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 02:01:18 GMT
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Date: 2001-05-31T02:01:18+00:00
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"Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> writes:

> In any case, my point was that your watch and my watch can both be ticking
> off seconds in relative synch even though my watch says "4:30am, Tuesday"
> {actually it doesn't "say" anything - you have to look at it.} and your
> watch says "3:15pm, Wednesday" You can therefore safely ignore leap-seconds
> and leap-years as long as all we're doing is saying "Let's meet for a beer
> at Ruby Tuesdays in The Gardens Mall, Palm Beach Gardens, FL (free plug
> there, guys!) in one hour, thirty two minutes and 15 seconds." As long as no
> leap-seconds or leap-years happen between now and then, we're fine
> (depending on traffic).

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).

Isn't all the leap-seconds business about converting to/from a human
readable form.  I mean, leap seconds are exactly one-second long, just
like any other seconds.  (Unlike leap years, which are longer than other
years.)

By the way, it seems to me that Ada *forbids* counting leap seconds, in
that the upper bound of Day_Duration is 86_400.0, rather than 86_401.0.
True?

> Time can be a *very* confusing business!

Indeed.

- Bob