Markus Kuhn
Wed, 29 Jan 2003 11:04:44 -0800
John Cowan wrote on 2003-01-29 17:56 UTC: > The problem is that they are not announced much in advance, and one needs > to keep a list of them back to 1972 which grows quadratically in size.
Is this a real problem? Who really needs to maintain a full list of leap seconds and for what application exactly? Who needs to know about a leap second more than half a year in advance but has no access to a time signal broadcasting service (the better ones of which all carry leap second announcement information today)? For pretty much any leapsecond-aware time-critical application that I can think of, it seems more than sufficient to know: - the nearest leap second to now - TAI-UTC now - UT1-UTC now This information is trivial to broadcast in a fixed-width data format. (For the nitpicker: The number of bits to represent TAI-UTC admittendly grows logarithmically as be move away from 1950. We know we can live with that, as O(log(t)) is equivalent to O(1) for engineering purposes.) Markus -- Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__