On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 3:09 AM, Vitaly Magerya <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2010-12-15 12:22, Alaric Snell-Pym wrote: >>> You can't use TAI to represent dates in the future, >>> as it would require leap seconds tables that are only published six >>> months before the leap seconds occur. >> >> But we're not trying to represent dates; we're trying to represent the >> pssage of time. > > Any monotonic clock with unspecified origin is sufficient to represent > passage of time. What Alex suggested was to use TAI clock specifically > to represent both passage of time and UTC (civil time, wall clock time, > "date", call it as you wish).
I said no such thing. I'm suggesting using TAI to represent an unambiguous point on a timeline, and presumably a record-like data type for dates. We use monotonic seconds primarily for timestamps and timeouts (i.e. times in the very near future). If you wanted to compute a date-time in the distant future and store it as TAI time, then your point about not knowing future leap seconds is valid. However, if you computed that time via second-interval arithmetic (i.e. you want exactly n seconds in the future) you'd be guaranteed to have the same loss in precision using POSIX time. -- Alex _______________________________________________ Scheme-reports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports
