Re: What problems do leap seconds *really* create?

[John Cowan]

Tom Van Baak scripsit:

> I worked on System III UNIX at Bell Labs and the
> only support for time zones was the TZ environment
> variable - which only supported signed integer hour
> offsets.

Be glad, then, that the early adopters of Unix in Ozland were on the coasts.

> After working on a mainframe that displayed
> time only in fractional millihours,

Gyukhhh.

> how cool it was that UNIX used a double-register
> (32-bit) integer to encode the time of day, had a
> TZ variable, and displayed time as HH:MM:SS.
> And all this at 2400 baud instead of 300. It was
> very clever.

Much nicer than my first system, the DEC PDP-8, whose operating system
didn't even know the time, only the date.  The kernel stored the date
as a 5-bit day, 4-bit month, and 5-bit year, but the file system only
kept the 3 low order bits of the year, in order to make the whole thing
fit in a 12-bit word.  The epoch was 1970-01-01, by chance the same as Unix's.
Of course, 2001-12-31 was the End Of All Things.

> As far as I remember in the code, and in practice,
> time_t was just a cute way to encode a date;
> nothing more.

You didn't routinely subtract two time_t values to get elapsed time in seconds?

--
You escaped them by the will-death              John Cowan
and the Way of the Black Wheel.                 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I could not.  --Great-Souled Sam                http://www.ccil.org/~cowan