On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 11:21 AM, Rob Speer <rsp...@luminoso.com> wrote:
> > I'm sure that the issue of "what do you call the leap second itself" is > not the problem that Chris Barker is referring to. The problem with leap > seconds is that they create unpredictable differences between UTC and real > elapsed time. > > You can represent a timedelta of exactly 10^8 seconds, but if you add it > to the current time, what should you get? What UTC time will it be in 10^8 > real-time seconds? You don't know, and neither does anybody else, because > you don't know how many leap seconds will occur in that time. > indeed -- even if you only care about the past, where you *could* know the leap seconds -- they are, by their very nature, of second precision -- which means right before leap second occurs, your "time" could be off by up to a second (or a half second?) It's kind of like using a carpenter's tape measure to to locate points from a electron microscope scan :-) The other issue with leap-seconds is that python's datetime doesn't support them :-) And neither do most date-time libraries. -CHB -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception chris.bar...@noaa.gov
_______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
