Time library underspecified

[Peter Thiemann]

Did anyone try to use the standard Time library that comes with Haskell for a serious purpose?

I wanted to, but came across the problem that the TimeDiff data type is underspecified. For example, what is the official way to convert a TimeDiff value into seconds? The problematic parts are:
* how many days for one tdYear (365, 366)
* how many days for one tdMonth (28,29,30,31)
* how many seconds for one tdMin (given the presence of leap seconds)^(1)
Actually, once the absolute reference of the TimeDiff is lost, then it
is impossible to recover leap years and leap seconds, so TimeDiff
better had to account for them somehow. I suppose, the best would be
to just have diffClockTimes return the number of seconds as an Integer.

Since Simon PJ has finished editing the library report, who's now in charge of keeping track of problems with it and perhaps writing a commentary in cases such as this?

Cheers
-Peter

(1) for this one, there is reasonable consensus. for example the ISO 8601 standard (representation of dates and times) defines minute=60 seconds, hour=60 minutes, day=24 hours. However, this leads to the strange(?) situation that the difference between
1998-12-31T12:00:00 and 1999-01-01T12:00:00
is 1 day and one second. (There was a leap second on that night

1998 December 31 23h 59m 59s
1998 December 31 23h 59m 60s
1999 January 01 0h 0m 0s

see http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/leap.html)



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