> On 14 Aug 2000, Russ Allbery wrote:
>
>> Day resolution is insufficient for most purposes in all the Perl scripts
>> I've worked on. I practically never need sub-second precision; I almost
>> always need precision better than one day.
>>
>
> MJD allows fractional days (otherwise it would of course be useless).
>
> As I write this the MJD is 51771.20833
I recognize that a lot of software packages out there are using MJD,
but I don't really feel that fractions of days, hours, or minutes are
intuitive. Mankind has had sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes
in an hour, twelve hours in a day, and so on up, for centuries.
Arguably, better systems could be created, and perhaps MJD is such a
system, but it is very hard to change the instincts and habits built
on older systems. (Just look at how slowly the U.S. is moving to
metric.)
I would really rather not see this change, or see the number
expressed in seconds. (MJD as seconds would really amount to just
moving the epoch, and I don't think that would make anyone happy.)
I still lean towards thinking that anything involving a date should
be pushed out into a module. There could be a date module (or two)
included as standard, and people who want MJD or other systems, or
fractions of a second, or whatever, could totally ignore the standard
module and use a different one.
J. David
