In article <201501251019290550.005c0...@smtp.24cl.home> you write: >I've always wondered why this is such a big issue, and why it's done >as it is.
A lot of people don't think the current approach is so great. >In UNIX, for instance, time is measured as the number of seconds >since the UNIX epoch. imo, the counting of the number of seconds >should not be "adjusted", unless there's a time warp of some sort. >The leap second adjustment should be in the display of the time, >i.e., similar to how time zones are handled. It shares with time zones the problem that you cannot tell what the UNIX timestamp will be for a particular future time. If you want to have something happen at, say, July 2 2025 at 12:00 UTC you can guess what the timstamp for that will be, but if there's another leapsecond or two, you'll be wrong. Life would be a lot easier for everyone except a handful of astronomers if we forgot about leap seconds and adjusted by a full minute every couple of centuries.