Hmm, this has come up before: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-bugs/2001-September/001810.html http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2002-January/008678.html
--- Peter Thiemann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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) > > > > _______________________________________________ > Haskell mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell ===== Christopher Milton [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your site http://webhosting.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
