On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 06:20:22PM -0800, Steve Allen wrote: : On Feb 19, 10:30 pm, la...@wall.org (Larry Wall) wrote: : > 2000 would have been a lovely epoch if only the astronomers had kept : > their grubby hands off of civil time. : : The astronomers might love to have the power to control something like : that, but I'm afraid that none who are alive now can take credit for : the international political situation. The root of the problem is : demonstrated here : http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/epochtime.html : Until the governments of the world agree on a major change in the : status quo there will be leap seconds.
I apologize to all the living astronomers for maligning them. :) I now see that the most important determinant of DateTimes is neither the Dates nor the Times themselves, but which TZ you're in. I propose renaming Temporal to TZ, so we get TZ::Date, TZ::Time, etc, since they're all dependent primarily on exactly where on earth you are, which determines how civil (or incivil) your cultural time is. It will also tend to prevent people from assuming anything universal about such types. Larry
