Zefram scripsit: > In the general case: to determine or use an interval of N calendar FOOs, > it is convenient to represent the time as a linear count of calendar > FOOs plus details of the exact position within the current FOO. FOO may > be minute, hour, day, week, month, or year. I think there should be > record formats for all of these cases (the native UTC format is one > of these with FOO = day), with conversion functions between them and > also a linear count of seconds.
That's overkill. If we confine ourselves to the Gregorian calendar, a time interval can be safely represented as a triple of months, minutes, and seconds. All time units longer than a month contain a fixed and integral number of months, and all time units larger than a minute and smaller than a month contain a fixed and integral number of minutes. (If we don't care about leap seconds, shock horror, we can just use months and seconds.) -- The man that wanders far [EMAIL PROTECTED] from the walking tree http://www.ccil.org/~cowan --first line of a non-existent poem by: John Cowan
