On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 10:21:37AM -1000, Joshua Hoblitt wrote: : On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, Larry Wall wrote: : Anyways, I recall some discussion on p6l from years ago about using : TAI (and I think specifically libtai) as the internal time format : for p6. Is this still the case?
As I said, I don't care what the internal time format is. I'm just sticking up for the average user of the next millenium. It's my gut-level feeling that 99% of users would prefer that continuous time be represented by a pseudo-continuous type like floating pint, and that we should all settle on an epoch that will still be easy to remember in the year 2149. So I think the default public interface needs to be floating point seconds since 2000.
Reasonable enough, though there's something to be said for a completely meaningless (to most people) epoch so folks stop treating the number as a number with meaning and instead treat it as a black box thing they can do offset math with.
Don't get me wrong--I think the concept of TAI time is great. It's just always going to be a fixed number of seconds different than Perl 6 time, is all, whatever the TAI time is for Jan 1, 2000, UTC.
That, as they say, turns out not to be the case. UTC has leap seconds, TAI doesn't. The two are slowly diverging--off by 32 seconds right now, and probably off by 33 this year or next, with extra seconds added irregularly. (It's why the decoded time array's seconds goes from 0-60 rather than 0-59)
--
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
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