Tim Jenness <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 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
Floating point? Or is the proposal to use fixed-point adjusted by some
constant multiplier? (Floating point is a bad idea, IMO; it has some
nasty arithmetic properties, the main one being that the concept of
incrementing by some small amout is somewhat ill-defined.)
> At some level time() will have to be changed to support fractions of a
> second and this may break current code that uses time() explicitly
> rather than passing it straight to localtime() and gmtime().
Agreed.
I guess I don't really care what we use for an epoch for our sub-second
interface; I just don't see MJD as obviously better or more portable. I'd
actually be tentatively in favor taking *all* of the time stuff and
removing it from the core, under the modularity principal, but I don't
have a firm enough grasp of where the internals use time to be sure that's
a wise idea.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
